MusicScienceGuy

Software Review: Musiah is an excellent keyboard teacher

Review: Musiah Virtual Piano Teacher - Monthly USD $24.99

Musiah is a très cool music learning application. It acts like a simulated virtual music teacher combined with a "video game" style approach to learning play a music keyboard. It largely succeeds.  With a few enhancements (planned for September) it should be even better.

For younger learners and some adults, Musiah is an excellent way to learn to play a keyboard, and may even completely replace the traditional beginning music teacher. I don't doubt that most students progress with this program faster than with a traditional teacher.

If you are interested, there's a two week free trial. Unusually, up to 6 family members can use the same license.

I suggest also trying out/alternating with Piano Marvel - it develops playing skills in other, useful ways. Piano Marvel also features the ability to purchase popular songs with excellent coaching in learning to play the purchased song. 

Update: This review has been "peer reviewed" by the authors of the programs mentioned.  The opinions given herein are still all mine, but I've corrected errors, adjusted phrasing and changed opinions where it seemed appropriate.

Premise and Appearance

Musiah appears much like a standard video game, but one with an interesting premise: you, a human, can save the galaxy from the invading Atonals, by learning to play the perfect musical weapon to defeat them. 

Visually Musiah is a treat, it has a nice, smooth flow to the visuals and the colours are great; some serious work has gone in here.

I liked the simulated classroom and especially loved the teacher, he was just so like a nice music teacher, including cute, expressive twitches (suppressed swearing?) when his student, to wit: you - makes a truly big mistake. 

The concept of being in a classroom, with friendly, supportive classmates who play along with you, is excellent and invokes practice-encouraging group instincts. Now, as far along as I got they were just background; I'd love it if later versions of the game have classmates giving a occasional bits of encouragement to the student.

The game is darned good at egging the gamer on to the next level, and it is obviously crafted by a master music educator. You just do not get all of this from a small shop in a couple of years. Regardless, this game uses the latest operating system and needs a late model Mac or PC.

Quality of lessons

The program has 13 levels, with about 10-12 music lessons per stage (plus a final finale level); about 130 lessons in all, claimed to be about the equivalent of “5-6 years of standard lessons”. To pass each lesson requires pretty deep, concentrated attention, the exact kind of "deep practice" that works well. 

The lessons are very good. My wife, a qualified music teacher in her own right, praises the arrangements, saying they are just what I need to learn.

The lessons start right in on 2-handed practice and give the left-hand a serious workout and involve training timing as well.

The difficulty ramps up rapidly; by the 5th lesson, entitled “Mary Had a Leg of Lamb” (perhaps a droll joke; the teacher is a plump, albeit civilized, Allosaurus) we were into harmony - parallel sixths; melody with the right hand, a major or minor 6th lower with the left. 
((Tip to jammer players: visualize it as down an octave and up a third.))

Challenges of the presentation

Here’s the first limitation: due to the video-game style presentation, the lessons are single-threaded, the student can tackle just one challenge at a time. This is good because the student must apply full attention to learning the one piece. Unfortunately, the student can get stuck, especially if using an alternative musical instrument.

Now, Musiah's author, Brendan Hogan, is adamant that the design of every note is planned to avoid bottlenecks: “[traditional] keyboard students do not get stuck in those places”. He's the expert, but I suspect that even traditional keyboard students will hit lessons where they progress pretty slowly, given the pretty intense ramping up of rhythm and notes in the lessons. On the plus side, if one does not drop out, the student will learn at an intense pace. 

Another limitation: the program has a really limited range of slow practice options. I got stuck in several lessons, and could not slow play down to the point where I could easily master the notes and then crank up the speed a few percent each time, as in other software. Instead, I had to practice the pieces "offline"; reading the score and just playing the notes.  

Quirks for the alternate keyboard player to note

Naturally, the arranger has chosen and designed songs that are easy to finger on the piano, with parallel harmonies that sound very nice. Inevitably, some of these are harder to do on the jammer, sonome, C-system accordion, or Dualo.

Let's look at a pretty standard example, suppose the arranger adds a parallel 6th below the melody. On the piano's white keys, in the key of C, the extra key to play is white, always two keys below the upper note; easy to play right? Whereas on the jammer, the relative position of that parallel note shifts between a minor 6th and a major 6th, depending on the position in the scale. It's significantly harder to learn at first, although I've devised some simple exercises to help learn the pattern.

With Rock Band and Piano Marvel, the solution to an too-tough exercise is first: give it a good try (this gets the brain thinking about it), then come back to it after a bit of time has passed. With Musiah the combination of exercises that are harder than the designer expected and one-and-only-one challenge at a time makes the program less suitable for alternate musical instruments. 

Compare to PIano Marvel

Musiah has less lessons than Piano Marvel (PM) but makes up for it, in some ways, by being fussier; especially it checks note duration. PM does not, and the lack does make one more than a bit sloppy. I do wish PM had a duration checking option, along with an option to tighten up the note-start checking as well.

PM needs a section-looping option; it would be just great to be able to repeat a selected passage until it's perfectly mastered. Musiah needs a better looping option; it only loops some selected sections and only twice. It needs the option to repeat any section up to, say 9 times.

For myself, while I found the story line charming, I found that Musiah's attempts to provide "tuition": to carefully "correct and teach"; actually got in the way of learning. I could get way more keyboard practice sessions using PM.

These products work in different ways, Piano Marvel is designed to help a teacher give lessons and act as an assistant in teaching and monitoring the student, or help the self-directed student practice deeply and steadily. Musiah is an software-embodied Brendan Hogan.

The ideal in Piano Marvel is to get as many "gold piano" (every exercise nearly perfect; an B+ average) trophies as possible, which is a high goal. This is actually very similar to the goal system in Musiah, which allows you to pass an given exercise with  an initial C+ grade, but then only passes the student to the next level after the student has gone back and brought the average of the 10-12 lessons to a B+ level. Very sneaky!

Target audience: pre-teen and adult

Musiah, especially if given the minor changes suggested above, can pretty much replace the basic, first five-to-six years of lessons, music teacher. It has literally infinite patience, and engaging story line, clear goals and feedback. Since the player generally would spend much more time in "deep practice" than is possible with a teacher, the learning speed will be correspondingly higher.

In fact, my concern is that Musiah could undercut the beginning music teacher, to the possible long-term detriment of the student. Studies (see Daniel Coyle's The Talent code: Greatness isn't Born. Its Grown. Here's How. See: chapter 9, the Coaching Love section) have made it clear how important the teacher is. Every single significant musical talent in the world had a special beginning music teacher, a teacher (or parent) that inspired, ignited, their student with a love of music and showed them how to learn and to feel pride in learning. Now with Musiah we are conducting an experiment: can software kindle musical talent?

Maybe it can: perhaps these programs can get music students quickly past the tedious levels of skill development, to the point where the student can really begin to have fun with music and ready to be ignited by a teacher.  One can hope.

The price is high-ish but reasonable; the program has many thousands of hours of development  invested in it, and the musical foundation it builds on is solid.

Unfortunately, I suspect that the game design will preclude teens from playing Musiah; most teens avoid child-ish seeming games.  I'll bet that the program's writers will eventually split the appearance into two or three versions, adding an teen version, and perhaps an adult version for  "mature students" who need to know the basics.

For the Adult learner

Musiah is not the ideal tool for the adult learner who already knows music, the rival product Piano Marvel has better features for the dedicated adult, such as the "space-bar" triggered practice session, practice-time count, and a huge repertoire. For this reviewer, who can read a score well and knows music theory, PM allows significantly more practice. 

 For more info, here's the  link           : 

Summary 

We live in exciting times musically, with programs that greatly assist learning and new alternate keyboards  that speed learning and allow versatile play.

When Musiah's new version comes out, I'll eagerly review it.

Ken Rushton

 

Related articles

Piano Marvel is better than it looks

On the other hand

My left hand displays unexpected musical talents

My jammer has a pair of symmetrical keyboards – in other words if you play Do-Rae-Mi with the middle, ring and little fingers of the right hand, you canalso play the same notes with the same fingers of the left hand. This means that notes go up away from your body, which totally bewilders some keyboardists – it verges on musical heresy!

However, this symmetry offers a big-time, huge advantage: you only have to work out one fingering for the new keyboard. Just to be sure I briefly tried out the other option – both keyboards going up to the right, but this was horrible - it more than doubled the work, and worse; the left hand just doesn’t work with the jammer scale going the wrong way: the fingerings were killer. Enough said: with the jammer’s Wicki-Hayden key layout the keyboards have to be symmetrical.

Now, while having to work out - and learn - only one fingering is good, the question remains: if one hand learns a pattern, does the other get an inkling of what to play as well? On all instruments I know of this question is moot (unless you practice years enough that the remapping is automatic), so we are into completely new musical (and possibly scientific) territory here.

A bit of background first; I have found that it’s best to have a minimum of 2 sets of music I am learning:

1. A relatively challenging new piece or two.

2. A short set list of songs I know relatively well – 80% or better, but that I can challenge myself to improve on (Rock Band 3 is great at encouragement). This practicing of a whole stream of notes – with immediate feedback of errors - seems to be just superb for skill growth and deep-lock-down. 

So I have played several songs many, many times. One, Centerfold by the J Geils Band.  I can play up to 90+% notes-correct with my eyes  mostly closed (there are some sneaky turns that make it hard to get higher).

How much has seeped through to my left hand? It was simple enough to get the answer: 63% of the notes of the whole song - not just the chorus.

63% is surprising, especially considering that my neglected left hand isn’t as speedy or precise as its brother.  25% I would have though good, 50% excellent, 63% means that the left hand picked up 2/3 of a musical skill effortlessly.

Wow. 

This has implications . . .

Playing the Jammer - navigation and hand positioning

Jammer playing basics, part 1: Basic navigation rules, and hand placement, along with a useful commentary. 

DRAFT - open for comments - updated Feb 25, 2013

Overall Navigation

The jammer-field and harmonics

The jammer key-field at first looks pretty bland and featureless; it's 'nothing' more than an array of note-making keys that go up in whole-tone step from left-to-right, and up by fifths in a diagonal direction.

You'll soon find however, that the very act of playing something on it reveals a solid musical structure; each note has a musical color or texture, partly on its own, partly relative to other notes.  This texturing/coloring is inherent in music, its just well hidden on the piano and most conventional instruments. I contend that because it is hidden, musicians normally learn this structure slowly, in small, unconcious steps.

The closest analogy I know: it's much like switching from working with Roman numbers to Hindu-Arabic numerals; The underlying numbers / notes haven't changed, they are just expressed and placed in a way that greatly supports working with them, which makes all the difference. For more details see: The Basis of Harmony.

Perhaps you can get a hint of this buy looking at the diagram to the right, which shows the harmonics of a note and where they fall on a jammer key-field.  chords and arpeggios follow this line of notes.

The rows

The middle three rows, the Root, Dominant, and Octave are where your fingers will be spending most of their time. 

I call this the Core. Just four fingers can reach an quite decent octave and a half worth of notes without moving the hand: the FGAB, BbCDE and two notes on either side; the Eb & Ab on the left and the F# & C# or the right (not shown in the diagram). This is an amazing 18 keys . . . and that's not even using the thumb, which can reach easily 6 to 8 more keys.

Quibles: the Ab to the bottom left,  E and F# to the top right can some times be a stretch; the little finger is a bit short, but this is a very good range indeed. Compare to the span of reach on the piano, usually 13 keys.

"Core" core rows

Of special significance is just two core rows: either the Root and Dominant, or their inversion; the Dominant and Octave.  Any 2 Core rows have all the notes of the scale. Thus all of the basic chords can be made.

 

Going farther a-field you can talk about sub- dominant, sub-octave. and the teritory above, the double-octave area. These are not important to the beginning player.

Close-harmony line slopes to the right

Also of note is the line of close harmony: this is an important musical concept. On the jammer it slopes to the right and is about 2 rows high. This region is the band where the notes and the relative volume of the notes' harmonics are close enough in pitch and intensity that they merge into, yes, harmony.

Columns

Key-centre column

• Key core;  the zig-zag line of the root and dominant notes.
• The Backbone or Extended Key core;  ;  the zig-zag line of the root, dominant and sub-dominant notes.  (pic needed)
• Major side;  The white keys
• Minor side; the black keys
  
• the minor and major lines:
  the zig-zag line paralleling the key core on the other, the minor side, a minor third down from the root and the dominant, In the Key of C, the notes are Eb and Ab
  in the Key of Amin  (pic)
• the zig-zag line paralleling the key core, consisting of the major third to the root and the major third to the Dominant, this last is also thought of as the major 7^th.
  in the key of C this is the E and B  (pic)
• Between the major line and the Backbone is a more dissonant region, I whimsically call it the gap.

Hand postitioning.

Fingers

- natural fall of the fingers lies on the axis of "close harmony" - this is very good ergomonics.

Also able to play most inversions.

Thumb

On the major scale, the thumb is very nicely placed to play the notes of the backbone. Indeed the thumb can play 2 musically useful (Root and (sub)dominant) notes at a go. This appears to be very handy. Note that the thumb has access to a range of 2 octaves of notes - without interfering with the ability of the fingers to play the notes they need to.

However in minor keys, it's not so well placed. I'm not sure how much of a problem this presents.

Chord parts

•  Just as the key imposes a “core and wings” structure on the notes of the bland W/H note-field.
• Most chords themselves have a “base” and “point” structure on the notes, with the base being the chord root and its dominant or sub dominant and the point being the third or minor third of the chord.
  This holds regardless of the inversion.
• Major 7^ts and minor 7^th chords have a double wing notes
• 7^th chords also have a wing.
• Diminished and Augmented chords have a double-wing structure, with augmented being straight-across, and diminished “tilted” to the right.

Once you know the shape of the chords, and the base & point structure, you automatically know what you are playing.

This Fingering

1. Keeps the fingers from tripping over each other
2. Maintains the hand and fingers on the key center and key axis
3. Generally speaking, each finger has an assigned set of keys that it usually hangs around on, the middle fingers for example presses the tonic and dominant 95% percent of the time, while the little fingers press the mediant and the leading-tone.
4. Assists both in learning to play, and in ear-training. 
5. With the help of a few marks on the keys, to never have to look at the keys, a great assistance to learning to play.

Guidelines

 Keep the fingering right!

- how to deal with fingers moving between adjacent keys (e.g. C to G)

Exceptions

-          Arpeggios

Advantages

-          Unique to be able to largely keep ones fingers centered over the key center, instead of moving all over the place.

-          Single note

Techniques

   Singling vs. Doubling

Fingering chord bases: using one finger to press two keys (doubling) vs. using a finger for each key (singling) of the chord base.

It’s not an either one or the other condition:

-          Doubling: generally, there is a significant reduction of the needed finger travel, the reach when doubling, over singling: you can get there faster.

-          Singling: On the other hand, singling a chord gives more finger control over the sound of each note, which is significant on slower passages.

-          Doubling quirks has the disadvantage, at least in the novice player, of requiring high precision in placing the tip of the finger into the gap between the keys. Even a .5 mm shift can cause one note to be muted. This slow one down.

-          In practice  it’s not hard to train oneself to switch automatically between the techniques.

I estimate that doubling gives about a 20% boost to the player in playing dexterity / speed trade-of - very good. 

Practicing

Scales - Demo required for each one.

-          major

-          Minor (don’t bother with harmonic and melodic at this point.

-          Minor and major pentatonic

-          Chord scales:  progress

-          Chromatic – useful

Musical snippets

-          Simple ascending and descending two-note progressions

-          major

-          Minor (don’t bother with harmonic and melodic at this point.

-          Minor and major pentatonic

-          Chord scales:  progress through the Series I ii ii IV V vi vii(dim) I

-          Inversion practices.

Question - which is better? 

1. Keeping the hand on the same keys and changing the notes underlying the keys?
2. Moving the hand to the notes?

Things to avoid

-          Any one thing too much!
The reason is that the fingers get skilled in doing, say scales, and it becomes too easy to play them, the movement can be triggered  at the wrong time; the overdone technique becomes a bad habit.

 

Hidden rules

At this point it's time to mention that you have to be cautious about how notes are played: there are some hidden traps. I once demonstrated the worlds most basic three-chord progression to some peofessional musicians and knew that somehow I had blown it; their politeness spoke volumes.   How could I have botched something so simple? Easy, when there are a number of hidden rules to making close harmony and progressions.

The progression is technically  the sequence I-IV-V-I.  In my demo, I played  these major chords, in standard root position;  C , then F, then G, then back to C? What could be complicated about this?

My wife ever-so-gently disabused me (but still had a tinge of I-can't-believe-that-I-have-to-explain-something-so-obvious - this was something she learned somewhere between the age of 5 and 10).  The really annoying thing was I had technically known the rules, but had not applied them to practice! 

The rule is just this: subtle motion, changing as little as possible sounds a lot cooler than big crashy jumps.

...more to come

(*)  side comment - any time a rule is mentioned, this is an opportunity for you, the composer: break the rule carefully and you may have something new and exciting. The Beatles did this, just to drop a name. One group that very successfully vilolated this rule is Level 42. (link to song needed)

Encouraging developments

... some hints on what to expect when learning an alternate instrument

Finally, I am seeing significant progress in playing my jammer. 
The critical point came after about 9 months of practicing 3 hours per week. Finally we have some data on what to expect in learning to play an alternate keyboards.

First, Some background analysis

Consistency = faster learning

The fundamental reason to use an consistent- layout (the formal, ugly name is "isomorphic") keyboard is to reduce the number of fingerings one has to learn, thus saving much time. This is the reasoning behind the century-old Janko keyboard.

 

 

 

 

2 Dimensions - faster learning + speed

Further, through use of two dimensions (fancy new concept, that!) and careful choice of the particular brand of layout consistency, one  gets further advantages: far simpler finger movements; and simpler, smaller hand movements (i.e. on the sonome and jammer respectively). These advantages compound, as shown in the rough (and quite conservative) picture of the advantage is shown right.

 

 

 

 But what is the real advantage?

Now this sounds very cool, and one could analyse finger movements and other ergonomics to estimate the learning speed, giving naive and erroneous results:
     Wow 1/12 the keys! times Log(1/4) the movement! that comes to 24 times faster! !

Whoa! There are other keyboarding skills that one must also learn: rhythm and developing a musical ear. The actual improvement rate will be somewhat less! Still, learning to play in many different fingerings is a significant challenge: the beginner's keyboard books I have devote over 2/3 of their pages to addressing this challenge. The best way, the only sure way, to discover the real learning rate improvement is experimentally.

What do we expect to see change?

How will this "increased learning rate" actually manifest? Unfortunately we humans only learn at a set rate: nerves only grow so fast; they will learn to press finger x down on key y at time z at the same rate on a piano or a guitar or a jammer.

So learning the first set of notes, chords and songs will take just as long. It is when you have to learn the next song that things will improve, and this should steadily increase over time.

 Once you've over come the little hurdles that being the first explorers in a new territory entail . . .

Initial confounding factors

Always the introduction any new gadget has confounding factors the slow down initial introduction. I have found three confounding factors that initially got in the way of learning my jammer.

1. It's a New Device

The first is simply that alternate keyboards are brand new: no body of common practice exists; the musician is on his or her own. Thus fingerings have to be worked out and limitations discovered, good beginners' practice pieces need to be found. 

Worse, current keyboard books and exercises for the beginner are optimized in various subtle ways for the piano, for example the Hanon excercises are designed specifically for the key of C. This sabotages them for our use.

I have may much progress in this area, and can save my fellow jammerists much work in this area. Let me know and I'll post what works.

2. The Horse-drawn notation

The second is the #$%#@$% ancient notation! Standard Traditional Notation (TN) is highly optimized for the traditional keyboard, and this presents a sustained obstacle: it takes mental time to translate an erratic note spacing to the even note spacing of an alternate keyboard, and the vertical progression of notes in TN to the folded layout of the jammer or sonome. Even with the Janko layout there is a lot of trouble.

The notation challenge was greater than I had hoped. However, I am discovering "this pattern translates to this chord inversion"  rules that do greatly help.

3. Nerves only grow so fast.

You still have to learn to press the right keys at the right time on any keyboard. The growth of the nerves and building of the movement skills still takes the same time. 

And the Actual Results are . . .

I expected and can now confirm, a new keyboardist can expect this initial learning experience: This is worse than I had hoped , better than I had feared. I am sure that two of the confounding factors can be greatly reduced:

Fixing the New device issues

I've worked out a fingering for the jammer, and found that it works very well, much better than the fingering used on a traditional keyboard. It is simple, ergonomic, puts all the needed notes under the fingers and is quick to learn.  

 

Fixing the Notation issues

As for the fact that we must live in a musical world that is flooded with TN, it is possible to work out rules of thumb for reading TN and simple training drills that speed developing this skill.

 

The actual experience

Twelve years ago I learned to sing, this required a lot of work (1+ hours/day) for 18 months.

Since I only have about 3 hours a week for jammer practice, I was prepared for a long spell of not much progress (naturally I hoped for much, much less, an month or four). Alas, it took 9 months.

Early experience

Just as indicated in the diagram to the left, there was a fair "learning to learn" period (All the details of this and the quirky XBox setup will be posted in a separate posting). Learning to play along with a song was at first a laborious process of translating a moving piano-layout image into a jammer's "folded scale" pattern. I learned to play 6 songs at "Normal" level, put them into a set list to use as a standard drill, and tried to gently improve them while I investigated learning other songs. I rigorously used the fingerings that I guessed will work best, even when the song of the moment could be played a bit more easily in a sloppier style.

Growing a new ear

At first not much happened, except ... my musical ear improved; I became and remain way more conscious of the keyboard part of songs, and I heard details on notes and timing I'd never heard of before. I got ghostly flashes of what keys were being pressed. My typing improved quite noticeably (to about double the speed -50 wpm), while my handwriting got worse. I knew what was going on - I was growing nerve connections and the nerves themselves slowly - at the rate of fractions of a millimeter a day. I has also snitched the handwriting wiring in my brain and repurposed it for jammer playing. 

One thought I had was "this is a really roundabout way to learn to type". Meanwhile things got a bit easier.

Then finally it came together

Then about two months ago, I took up Billy Joel's Miami 2017, in D major,  at the "Hard" level, and found that I could play large parts of the Intro section - which has quite a sequence of eighth-notes at half speed right off the batch correctly. It thereafter took me a full month to bring my speed up to 100% of Mr. Joel's without a single error, but the important part was the instant way that "my fingers" had learned the general pattern from doing a few specific songs and had developed speed. Had learning generalization begun, of was it just a fluke?

The fingering works

Another important fact was that I could play the whole thing - 1 1/2 octaves without moving my hand more than a centimeter or two. The keyboard fingering was validated, and in fact works very well; there is not a note combination or sequence that is hard to play in the songs I've covered.

Now (mid-January 2012)

Last week I moved on to Paul McCartney's Maybe I'm Amazed, which has twice the chords of the songs in my set list set, at the normal level. I played many sections of it at full speed, right off the bat, and now after a week of practice, I can play nearly the whole song at full speed. I can also play it with my left hand at 70 % speed! While musically this is not thrilling: "Normal" level in Rock band 3 is 2-note chords, this is great validation in several ways:

1. The jammer fingering really works well: The fingerings were easy, my hand do not have to move more than 2 1/2 centimeters over a wide range of chords.
2. A simple, consistent ergonomic fingering really does facilitate skill generalization. So went the theory, so goes the actual practice!
3. Skill transfer between hands really does happen at a very significant rate. This will be a big, no a huge, time saver.

Analysis

It's about time I saw some results! Who would have thought that the initial part of learning to play an instrument would be such a slog? Fancy that:  learning is hard work, even if you sugar coat it and add all sorts of nifty gadgets and get-educated-quick schemes.

Caveats: I'm 59, thus my nerves may grow a trifle slower than an spritely young 30-year old. This just means I have to be a bit more dedicated and sneakier.

The Future

In the long term, we hope for results as charted above. Lets see what really happens!

Ken.

Extra Notes.

I've done this before, that is, I've already learned one, far more complex instrument, about 13 years ago. The instrument was my voice. That's right, I'm one of the few adult people that have learned to sing from no singing ability whatsoever (I kept recordings and can prove it), with "no singing ability" being defined as (1) unable to match pitch (or octave) with another singer or instrument and (2) no ability to properly vocalize: I sounded lousy.

Learning to sing was a lot of work: it took 18 months of roughly an hour or two a day (an hour of lessons/week, 3 hours in a community choir, and an hour a day of practicing while commuting in a car) before singing simple songs became as effortless as walking.

The moral: Learning a new skill as an adult takes time but eventually you can get there.

The Jammer and Rock Band 3 - updated

Is this a painless way to quickly learn the rudiments of keyboarding?

Now that all components of my jammer are in built and in place, I’m focusing on learning to actually play the thing, as quickly and painlessly as possible.

However, “the possible” is rapidly changing due to innovations in several areas. This is an exploration of what gaming technology has recent brought in, which seems at first bizarre - what could games possibly have to do with music?

Guitar Hero, when it burst onto the scene a few years back, intrigued.  The game itself was only a game, and taught the player only to press a few buttons in time to music, guided by visual effects that force-fed the buttons and timings. Yet, it had definite possibilities: it was well designed, gave fast, accurate feed-back on mistakes, immediate reward for success and was not a slog like formal practice is, but way fun; my son played it for hours, and organized parties around the game. 

Side note: I sometimes ponder; if my thirty-something son had spent just half of the time and intense  focus he spent playing video games (say 8,000 hours out of an estimated 16,000) on practicing an instrument he would now be a certified virtuoso and I could retire.   

Quick, accurate feedback coupled with a measured reward system are the key ingredients for fast, child-style learning, which is exactly what one wants in learning to play music – dry rote study can only be done for so long before the mind and the fingers revolt. Besides, my goal is to be able to join a good band, sometime before I grow old and senile, and so time is of the essence. Rote learning is just not very effective - very few pro musicians learned that way! - and it is s-l-o-w.

Hardware

Just in the last few months has it become possible to hook up midi instruments to a high-quality video game.  The ingredients (beside the game console itself) are:

1. A decent game: said game is Rock Band 3, and it has a “PRO” instruments option; the option to select having a real instrument (midi) hooked up to it
2. An Xbox/Playstation/Wii to Midi input interface:  Rock Band 3 midi PRO-Adapter. One plugs a standard Midi cable (non-USB) into it.
3. An instrument with standard midi-out, of course.

So what about alternate instruments? Can they work as well?  The answer is an unqualified yes. The additional ingredients are:

1. A decent alternate keyboard or other instrument:  even a PC keyboard will do, although it has definite limitations.  The raw, unmodified Axis-49 will work, but the signal has to do through a computer.
2. Midi-routing software to convert the instrument’s production (which comes in on the “Midi-In” logical buss) to a signal on the “Midi-Out” buss.
   My new Midi Integrator does this well and there are doubtless others. Midi Integrator is free, works on Win/Mac machines, works as soon as installed and is easily configured.

That’s it. Setup is pretty simple, for technical details, see hooking up alternate keyboards.

Experience 

I've only had 4 sessions as of this writing, and the first two were mostly spent in learning to run an XBox. Perhaps 3 hours of practice.

• It was a shock at first to play – the layout is just as you’d expect: a piano-like tableau, but thank fully the C-D-E sections are colored differently from the F-G-A-B sections, a trick I independently invented and documented here:  http://www.musicscienceguy.com/2008/03/jammer-playing-reading-music-scores.html. This helps a great deal. 
• I was able to select songs I knew well, a couple of Billy Joel pieces.

• At first it was pretty hard to relate hitting a key that was way off to the left or right as being really under or over the current row. My fingers would get confused, and would say "the diagram says it's over there, why do you want me to go down here or up there".

• By the second session, I was getting used to it, and by the fourth session it seemed fairly natural. Still I have a long way to go. Interestingly, playing pieces ranked "harder pieces" on the jammer actually seemed to improve the learning rate, as it was pretty simple to memorize the movements.  With the aid of a dot on C to help with touch-positioning, I did not need to look at the keyboard.

• Sharps and flats give me trouble still are giving me trouble, but since they are always in the same relative place, I even managed to hit a few.

• Playing practice scales in "Practice mode" was not useful at all -the fingers got totally mixed up and did not improve! This is totally counter-intuitive, and an interesting discovery, possibly even a scientific-investigation worthy one.  *
  I am not sure why this would be. Good thesis material, perhaps?

* "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny'" - Isaac Asimov

Update #1 

Just had my fifth session (about an hour an a half) - learning progresses, at a rate noticeably greater than I have gotten from standard practice. I have gone from one star to 3- stars at the "easy" level.

Future Thoughts

With midi integration, this could train a musician to be very versatile on a jammer or sonome:

• want to sound like Jimi Hendrix? Hmmm, just add the pitch and mod effects and pedal control and switch to Guitar mode
• Want to play drums – just figure out a finger mapping that makes sense, you’ll have all the basic drum sounds under the fingers of one hand, and turn on drum training.

Who will be the first to try?

 

Midi Integrator 1.0 released

Introducing a radical new midi-utility concept: table-driven midi integration software for faster, flexible instrument building. All inputs on a PC can become midi inputs, as needed, with easy reconfiguration.

Midi Integrator 1.0 is fully tested and works as soon as unzipped.

The online description can be found here: http://www.altkeyboards.com/integrator and you can download the Max/MSP source, executable and manual here: http://www.altkeyboards.com/file-cabinet. Midi Integrator is copyrighted and released under GPL3.

A few highlights of Integrator:

· Adds sustain, pitch-bend and modulation controls, via one or more touch-pads or a mouse, to any midi system with a Win/Mac PC .

· Can trigger any note, control command, pitch-bend, or preset action at the touch of a key;

- Converts your PC-keyboard into an auxiliary midi-input controller and keyboard.

· Works especially well with 2-dimensional instruments like the Axis-49 and -64.

· Enables features that are normally considered “high-end”, such as keyboard splitting (parts of a keyboard playing other instrumental sounds), key-modulation or octave-shifting at the touch of an assigned key.

· Extensible with a Max/MSP development system. For example, it can be made fully micro-tonal.

I discovered the need for a midi integration system when building my then-experimental jammer keyboard. I found that programming key-reassignment was an absolute pain, and so I made the configuration table-driven. This proved to be very significantly faster and much more convenient.

Next, I envisioned a host of features needed to push a midi system well beyond the ordinary: mulitple-sustain controls, mouse-controlled pitch bend, key-modulation, and more. I guessed that with a little bit of extra work I could create a system useful to many, and so I put sustained effort into creating a package that could be easily customized according to your needs.  I also created a variety of annotated configuration tables to help get started.

Well, the "little bit of work" turned out to be a "fair bit of work", so I hope many musicians and developers find my system useful. If you think Midi Integrator has merit, please post about it!

MusicScienceGuy

 

Midi Integrator (Formerly Keyboard Integrator) is nearly at the beta stage

I have little extra time in my life, so when it comes to blogging, practicing or developing, I have to choose one or the other, and choose the one that will give the most benefit to the most people. For the last 4 months I've focused on developing Keyboard Integrator (a better title might be Midi Integrator, but I'm stuck now with the name). The reasons for this hard work? The tool will fill a big gap in midi software, and make possible much faster development of alternative musical instruments. At the other end, will be useful just to make any computer more of a digital audio workstation.

So what the heck is it?

A simple, open-source (free) system to convert PC inputs; keyboard, mouse, joystick etc, to midi input, combine it with other midi instrument input, then route it to whatever real or virtual instrument you wish.

The goal is to have a “set-up once and forget” process.

Highlights:

• Allows one to add one or more a pitch-bend and modulation touch-pads to any midi keyboard, and works especially well with new 2-dimensional instruments like the Axis-49.
• Can convert your PC-keyboard into an auxiliary midi-input controller, with any key triggering either a note, a control command, pitch bend, or preset action.

This grew out of a project to build jammer keyboards, into what I hope will be a great resource for anyone that needs their computer to help them more with music production.

Ken.

for more info, see: http://sites.google.com/site/altkeyboards/instruments/integrator

 

Welcome

Ever longed to quickly learn an expressive musical instrument?

I and my friends are attempting to write out information about music, especially how to learn it, make it, and how the thing actually works, all in a more-or-less scientific (yet whimsical) way.

Warning, this is my personal blog, and is apt to contain babbling, for more organized information on alternative, innovative instruments, See: Alternative Keyboards, which is much more organized and readible.

This site's Current focus is a faster, innovative music keyboard called a jammer keyboard, here is the Wikipedia article.

And here is a link to John Moriarty playing a jammer.

In a nutshell, we are combining current music theory, modern knowledge and simple ergonomics to produce "piano 2.0"; an improved musical keyboard,mostly built on the $430 AXiS-49 keyboard from C-Thru  plus a few other things. 

I've built four jammers and have found they have very significant advantages over the traditional design .. and few disadvantages too, of course.

In balance, they are faster to learn, very significantly faster and easier to play and more expressive. They are also easier to play by ear, in other words, to jam, hence the name.

In practical terms, it takes 10 years to become skilled enough to be passable pianist. With the jammer design, the same level should be reachable in 3 yrs. It's not a free lunch, but it is less expensive, yet ultimately a better value.

Indeed, the meshing of the keyboard layout with music theory, kinesiology and human perception is a great leap forward: it's fun to have an instrument where the melody and the chords intertwine, where it's blink'n easy to add chords to a melody and music just plain makes sense.

Like children, it takes a community to grow an innovation, so please join in; post your ideas and comments. This is your opportunity to make a difference, to get in at the start of something very cool, and have fun doing it.

Ken Rushton, MusicScienceGuy

Making a virtue out of necessity

When one is faced with limited options, sometimes the limitations spur innovation.
In other words, any idiot can make perfection with perfect tools and gadgets, but it takes a real idiot to fake success successfully.
 
With the M-audio unit, the PC board does not split evenly in half, instead there's a row of 49 and a row of 39 keys.
This means there are 39 keys that can be paired up, with 10 left over.
39 keys is pretty good, - that gives almost 20 keys for each side (actually more, if one is clever with programming). the extra 10 can be either used as more notes, or as I've elected, special keys.

The layout I've elected is to make each side into separate logical keyboards, one for each hand. the default setting is for them to work together as a single piano keyboard, with the right hand C being C3 - "middle C" and the left-hand main-row C being C1. The rows above are of course the octave above. (The top row and bottom row are, alas, the same note as the upper middle and lower middle row - I just put in an extra row of keys onto the M-Audio's physical keys, I figured they'd still be handy for keying)

This only gives a measly 4 or 5 octaves - not too impressive when you started off with 7 and a bit. Not too much compensation that they are great octaves, really easy to play.
However, there are those extra control keys at the side
- can we use them to improve the keyboard?

ZipEx2 Special Keys

 

One possible set-up is as illustrated.

The layout I've chosen gives one:

 

- access to the rest of the octaves - all of them
- an easy way to do a halftone modulation
- a way to do a "one-line" shift
- a simple way to switch to any key.
- an easy way to reset.  

 

 

ZipEx2 split

Here's how the keyboard divides into a left and right logical (virtural) keyboard, each of which can be  independently assigned a instrument, and/or a desired octave range. I'm hoping it will make contrapuntal motion in the same octave really easy.

A wearable Keyboard: the small "ZipEx" jammer

 

The wearable ZipEx is a 4-row musical jammer keyboard I built because (1) one can't buy a Thummer yet and (2) it happens to be surprisingly easy to build from a "regular" keyboard. Jammers have several advantages over a traditional keyboard.

This design is also a living illustration that one can make a virtue out of necessity; when forced to make do (e.g. can only make 4 rows), then the "making do" forces interesting innovation (e.g. use tricks to make the thing have 8 rows - take that Thummer!), and with the dementia that comes of gadget-building obsession.

This unit has 4 rows of 15-20 keys, arranged thus, when playing in "laptop" mode:

ZipEx Playing- Hands on Same Side

And in "guitar" mode:

ZipEx Playing-hands on alternate sides

 

 

The black keys at the side are pitch and octave-shifting function keys, used to make it pretend to have more rows and keys. In effect one can have a 96-key keyboard that pretends, if you want it to, be two keyboards, one for each hand.

So there you have it, the music geek's newest fashion accessory: 

 

 

A bit more portable than a Piano?

I've actually had multiple people stop me and say: "what the hell is that?" - no finer accolade can a geek get.