MusicScienceGuy

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 . . .

Rock Band 3 Rocks at learning music

Here's the basic scoop: RB3, is actually good at teaching how to play exotic alternate keyboards like the jammer. I estimate it is 2-300% better at teaching some key musical skills (with some caveats),  than the several other kinds of practice I've tried.

It's not perfect (duh - it was never designed for this), but it was well enough designed for teaching intrumental skills that it generalizes to a crazy instrument like the jammer. What's more, it's  simulation of being in a "real" rock band is fun and engaging.

I'm been busy and having a good time at various things, and spare moments are spent with RB3, so blogging has been negected. However I have collected a fair bit of notes, and hope to make clear where RB3 is useful.

Ken.

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?

 

Building a better keyboard - Easier to Learn?

What if there was a musical instrument that was easier to learn, faster to play and best of all, provided a special insight into how music comes into being?  

Herein I present the “jammer”, an innovative musical keyboard design, and why it’s so cool.

The 12 notes of the scale

First, let’s design a music keyboard from scratch, as if you’d never seen one before.
There are 12 notes in an octave,
     spaced apart by a semitone. 
     Two semitones steps make a wholetone.

 

Step 1: Lay out the keys in one row all equally spaced by semi-tones, like this, and you have the layout of a harp's strings (in the uncommon {so I am told} 6x6 arrangement).

Twelve notes on two rows

But unlike in a harp, we don't have to be linear, and we don't have to base our design on a early harp-like instrument that only had the C-major scale's notes.
Next: It makes sense to stagger notes so they alternate: 

And slam them closer together:

 

  

Notes of the major scale

 

So far so simple. If you play all in sequence all 12 notes you get a chromatic scale, presumably so named because it has every color of note on the scale. Most musical scales are whole tone based, with the type defined, largely, by the notes they skip, and when they sneak in a semitone jump. With this layout, a major scale goes as shown right:

 

 

If you add a third row on top, then you can play any scale, in any key using the same pattern.

 

Playing major scale on jammer

You have much less to learn – 1/12th (!) as many patterns as on a standard piano keyboard.

This is the Janko pattern and is over a century old.

It's also a trifle bulky, as you can see if you click the above link.

The technical term, used (I suspect) to either scare off non-geeks or to sound intellectual is isomorphism. I prefer the term consistent-interval, or simply consistent. (Personally I bet we'll one day hear the term in a science fiction show: "he's gone isomorphic, Jim")

Compare to learning the piano as show here:

Playing major scales on piano

It was first designed without black notes,
and its totally designed around the C-major scale. 

Other scales are fiendishly hard to play.

It's rumored that the Janko pattern was scuttled, despite being favored by noted pianists, by piano teachers. Who would have thought!

 

 

So, there you have part one - make a keyboard consistent, and it's (a lot!) easier to learn.
Part two is here.