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Comment by hn_submit | Hacker News Reader

This is great. It also shows how complex it is to play a guitar. I think it would take me ages of practice to play even a simple song.

Maybe add an option that shows the finger positioning (with adjustable transparency so you can also see the touch points on the strings).

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It makes me wonder how long it will take robots to approach the dexterity of even a six year old child, some of whom can play guitar pretty well. And guitar is commonly thought to be an "easier" instrument. Something like an erhu only has two strings and is fiendishly difficult to master.

I’ve sadly stopped being curious about that since I realised that we’re already cyborgs, only the other way around from what popular sci-fi predicted: the internet does the thinking and the meatbags move their fingers. It started with GPS, came for software engineering and won’t stop any time soon. Actuators won’t be critical if humans are ever more fungible.

Maybe guitar is easy if you only strum cowboy chords.

I used to play the piano and am learning electric guitar, and guitar feels way harder because there are 1000 ways to pick a note (articulation wise), bending, legato, plus the complexity of the fretboard vs linear piano layout.

Classical piano was hard mainly because there are sooo many notes to read all the time for all the different voices.

Piano is much harder. The fretboard is how I think about music generally, it is much easier to re-call intervals vs piano, I don't think either layout is particularly difficult to memorize though. There are a lot of ways to pick a note but you'll find 99.99% of them are wrong. That's one plus on piano, the most experienced and least experienced person can make the same sound relatively easily on it. I think the main thing is on piano you're often doing 3 things at once. On guitar you're doing "2" things. Arguably, the right (or left) hand isn't doing much at all so you don't really have to think about or practice it the same way one does on piano.

I agree there are a lot more little techniques on guitar that don't exist on piano but a lot of them are very easy to master in a short amount of time.

I think getting really good at either is a lot of work, but I can teach someone to play a recognizable song on guitar in a very short amount time, a few hours or less depending on the person, to play even "beginner" songs on piano can be weeks of practice for a newcomer.

This is quite old but worth a mention. :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RBSkq-_St8

I like it because it shows how easy it is to compose a song though (if, of course, you first learn to finger a few chords—and everyone knows you only need to learn three chords).

Canonically, a hit is more likely if you use four chords:

https://youtu.be/5pidokakU4I?is=gPjE8VERGB3IJJEU

But which three or four chords are best to learn?

C, G, Am and F for some definition of best.

Is there a logic behind this? Can you play any song with just those chords?

Well, without going into music theory (which, ha ha, I am ignorant of), these chords "go together"—they're in the same "key" [1].

(And there are perhaps hundreds of songs that use the same chords [2].)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%E2%80%93V%E2%80%93vi%E2%80%9...

[2] https://youtu.be/dFpryVMgni0

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