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.

I'm curious in both of these cases what you are using for feedback. Specifically in the rhythm case, how do you know if you nailed it or just played some other rhythm than was shown by your cards? Did you also generate the sound?

In the case of playing a random piece of music, if you don't know it, again, how do you know how well you've done? I've been contemplating a similar thing with my repertoire playing, choosing a random bar for revision or learning via Anki.

Another thing - it sounded like you already played your instrument well, but wanted sight read, when you were doing this learning. So perhaps you already had a lot of the phrases in your fingers so to speak and this was just allowing you to connect the notation to what you already knew how to play. Do you think this would have worked well in my case where I could play a different instrument but didn't have any mechanical memory of chord shapes, arpeggios and so on in my fingers?

Good questions. How I knew I was doing it right is the same as for the rest of my practice, which is I would often record myself and listen back. It’s pretty cringe inducing but you’ve got to do it if you want to get good and better to listen to yourself sounding bad on your practice recording than to hear yourself sounding bad on playback in a studio when there are a lot of other folks there and time is money. A lot of people who are serious also video themselves practicing tyo fix bad habits although I never really did that.

And then yes I was ok when I started to really focus on reading but I was very serious about getting good in general so was practicing a bunch of scales, arpeggios, learning other people’s lines, etc. on bass (and guitar) when you play a lot of scales you develop a lot of mechanical memory so you have like a plan in your mind of the entire fingerboard and you can decide where best to shift position etc. I used to come up with studies for myself to practice what to do if I wss in an awkward spot (eq starting low with the tonic on my little finger etc). That stuff ends up helping your reading a lot because you can get yourself our of any kind of jam generally.

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.

If you have an environment set up with a pyproject.toml, just select the Jupyter kernel you installed in the environment. That feels like the case that is well handled by current tooling.

I believe this is solving the common complaint that you can't just email a jupyter notebook, since it doesn't capture the dependencies.

let's say you have a project with a pyproject.toml and some notebooks. You'll have to 1. Come up with some name for the kernel, 2. Add a script to install the kernel, polluting the collaborator's jupyter installation 3. Add a README referring to 2.

It sounds like you expect the collaborator to have one jupyter installation that you would pollute with the kernel. In my projects that use jupyter, I always have jupyterlab as one of the dependencies. Not sure about the naming part, since I usually just put my project in a directory named for the project, and uv uses that name for the venv, so I literally have never had to "come up with some name for the kernel".

In my case, I usually cd to the project directory, activate the associated environment, then do one of the following to work on a notebook in one of my projects, `jupyter lab`, `pycharm .`, or `code .` and go from there. In all of these cases, I get the ability to open notebooks that make use of this environment, either in the actual Jupyter lab interface, or in the tool's notebook interface (pycharm or vs code). All of these options make it pretty effortless to use the kernel associated with the environment - it's either automatically selected or it's the default in the dropdown.

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.

Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS)

Thank you, there was absolutely no clue in the article for what that jargon/meme meant, and googling for gas obviously didn't help.

I don’t think there are any readily available keycaps for your Axiom because M-Audio used faders with an odd size of stem and probably made custom moulds for the ones you have.

What I meant is that used Axioms are usually missing keycaps.

But they can be found cheap and have many great features. Plus the keybed is ok’ish.

I've been tracking my sight reading practice for four years using an iPad app, storing the results and plotting them. I am still seeing progress even after four years.

If you're ever looking to learn sight-reading of lead sheets that use chord symbols, take a look at: https://mikebwilliams.com/chords/

You can do the same thing where you configure it to just one key, start with the basic triads, etc.

This is amazing, thank you! I have indeed been looking for something like this.

Very commendable but I never got the hang of reading score and playing. Even if I could manage some bars, it never stuck. I will definitely try again.

However, meanwhile I am learning the basic skills - starting with chord progressions in different keys (and as a side effect learning different scales) - and I am able to enjoy learning and playing music without the stress and anxiety of sight reading.

I have found a teacher (online from London) who follows this harmony first approach - and it has really changed the game for me.

Different approach and journey - but the destination is probably the same.

I have found being able to sight read relatively easily to unlock a vast trove of music I'd like to be able to play which would have been harder to pick up purely by ear. It's definitely worth learning the things you're talking about. I found the surest way to get good at that kind of playing is to play with other people. The time dependence of having to keep up with everyone makes the feedback really tight.

Playing with other people also highlights other perhaps unexpected skills. I played in a band for a while and I still retain the skill of reading chords off other player's hands. You also need to be able to respond to someone just shouting "OK, let's go to C minor" in ways that only matter in that context. When you're listening or sight reading, you don't need names.

I agree. Sight reading does open up avenues - and my ultimate goal is improvization. I love to analyze various pieces and understand the functional aspects of tunes - so that I don’t need to rely on reading or remembering.

That is why JazzSkills.com really worked for me. You can find several free videos on their YouTube channel - https://m.youtube.com/@JazzSkills

I almost gave up on learning and playing music after struggling for years / decades - and by happenstance came across JazzSkills few years ago. And since then every single day I get joy in learning and playing music.

For me it's less about melody and harmony than it is about rhythm, I often need to see or notate a syncopated rhythm in order to "get" it. Though that might just mean I haven't internalized a lot of syncopated rhythms.

Sight reading never really ends - I tested a friend (professional virtuoso) when he was drunk at a noisy party and he sight read one of the Chopin song transcriptions by Liszt (I deliberately chose something a bit obscure).

Nothing quite as crushing as seeing people sight read things that would take you months/years to learn with the score... :)

Thanks for sharing your journey!

It's the HORSE (basketball) equivalent of piano.

The charts are neat. Are you using any insights gained from the data collection to guide your practice?

I'm not tracking my music practice (maybe I should) but I've been wearing a health tracker for years and have collected a ton of data. None of it seems very actionable because there have been no surprises.

These charts are serving a few purposes. First of all, it is motivating to me to see improvement. I can see for instance learning curve dropout when I skip practice, and knowing what a gap will look like on the chart motivates me to keep going. I also use the key-specific curves to choose keys to focus on, so that I don't keep going on the ones I know well. I'm planning to add some more visualisation to understand if there is a pattern to perhaps sharps or flats being harder, or if there is a sharp to flat transition effect which I suspect at the moment - after playing a few days where all the keys are sharps, it feels weird to move to flats.

I played horn for 4 years in middle and high school. Never got good at sight reading. But never really enjoyed playing either, practice was always a drudgery . Finally admitted to myself that I just didn't like it and quit.

There is the problem with music - it is many 'man-months' of sounding bad and not having fun before you are good enough to sound good and have fun.

macOS and iOS have a whole feature called Focus modes which allows you to choose a focus and do things based on this focus. Your current focus is shown in the menu bar.

Yeah but that is just a small icon, no text.

The idea that binary formats are the way because "you're going to use a program to interact with the format anyway" ignores the network effects of having things like text editors and unix commands that handle text as a universal intermediate, while having bespoke programs for every format dooms you to developing a full set of tooling for every format (or more likely, writing code that converts the binary format to text formats).

More recently though, consider that LLMs are terrible at emitting binary files, but amazing at emitting text. I can have a GPT spit out a nice diagram in Mermaid, or create calendar entries from a photo of an event program in ical format.

I've had the best luck at getting it to produce diagrams-as-code like mermaid or plantuml.

I know but those diagrams often don’t adequately capture what I want. Think of diagrams in nice technical talks or papers. I’ve even tried having the LLM (Claude) generate SVGs. They all fall short.

Do you also object to people paying money to have other people's art in their homes? Is the moral damage from getting an artwork in your home that you didn't create inversely proportional to your monetary investment?

If something else created it for you, is that your art?

Yes in the sense of ownership, no in the sense of authorship.

I notice you say "something" and not "someone". With humans, contribution varies. I could commission a piece and have a great deal of input on the final result, or I could just have exercised judgement to choose the piece. Many people descibe their clothing choices or home decor choices as "creative" or "creative expression".