Interesting track, there are a number of pianists (very good ones) that went that route. Keith Jarrett for instance, and Friedrich Gulda.
The conventional way of learning piano has a student learning sheet-music pieces that get increasingly difficult as the student improves. It's a fairly linear path, and the vast majority of students will never be able to play a difficult piece like, say, Chopin's Fantaisie Impromptu, as well as a top performer.
Similarly the vast majority of students going the chords/voicings/improvisation route will never be able to play Over The Rainbow as well as Keith Jarrett, but they can at least have the satisfaction and enjoyment of doing it in their own unique way.
Composing your own music takes it a step further again.
Obviously there are going to be incredible performers at the high end but there is plenty of fun to be had in the middle and even on the low end.
I have a few pieces that are so beautiful compared to evertyhing else out there that if that were the norm those pieces might as well never be performed again, but then again, it's all subjective and what I like you might not.
> Similarly the vast majority of students going the chords/voicings/improvisation route will never be able to play Over The Rainbow as well as Keith Jarrett, but they can at least have the satisfaction and enjoyment of doing it in their own unique way.
Yes, true. And that too is a lot of fun. I did some jam sessions with the sax (and I wasn't all that good), most fun I had making music to date.
> Composing your own music takes it a step further again.
That might actually at some level be more essential than just reproduction. The cave men had it easy: everything they did was original.
The beauty of a piece doesn't depend on its technical difficulty. Back when I used to play classical music more I loved playing a few of Chopin's Nocturnes repeatedly - they were about the right level for me so it was fun, and I could play them pretty well, I think. But I also spent a lot of time learning a few harder pieces (like Fantaisie Impromptu), and I remember getting frustrated that it took me ages to learn them and, although in the end I could play them sortof OKish, my efforts just weren't a patch on what a better pianist could do.
Looking back I can see that I shouldn't have picked such hard pieces until I was really ready for them. It was probably a big part of why I ended up quitting for quite a few years before taking it up again more recently with an entirely different approach.
Give it a try if you have an opportunity, I'm curious what you make of it given that you are roughly on the same path but clearly very much ahead of me.
And I might as well put in a feature idea (which I suspect would be rather tricky to implement but here goes anyway!): it would be awesome if it could take input from a mic and figure out the notes from that, so it could work with acoustic instruments too :)