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Comment by peeters | Hacker News Reader

I think this a cool idea. I think piano needs its own version of the guitar tab to be more approachable. For someone who knows the basics, just seeing the chords goes a long way. But this gives better detail.

One thing it glosses over is how the format responds to greater range. It acknowledges the fact that only 3 of piano's ~7 octaves are shown, but it doesn't address how much difficult it would be to read if there were notes in both the C2 octave and C6 octave at the same time. It gets much more difficult to line up the timing in that case because your eyes would be scanning frantically every note.

In traditional sheet music, notes played at the same time are never more than an inch or two apart. Will this format support sheet music's equivalent of 8va to keep notes properly within visual range?

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> I think piano needs its own version of the guitar tab to be more approachable

But then you end up with the same problem you get on guitar: beginners use tab as a crutch and don't develop skills as readily as they should once they're over the beginner hump.

This is the hardest part of learning and teaching music. On one hand, it's hard to stay motivated when you're mangling Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, but almost any shortcut you take in this stage will retard your growth later...

The best way to do that stackable staves: see the last two lines here: http://i.imgur.com/tqZRXzt.jpg

Ledger lines preserve the melodic contour but it's harder to read the notes. 8va's stay within the regular five lines you know how to read, but fragment the melodic curve. This way has the advantages of both the above and the disadvantage of neither.

(The lack of key sig in that image is a limitation of the software it was printed out from, I think; it should start in E and change around a bit afterwards. The "3"s are that software's way of printing tuplets.)

That's cool, I hadn't played any piece that uses the stacked staff (to my recollection anyway; it's been a good 15 years since I was actively training). It does work better for when the melody progresses into that range, true, but I think it's a "right tool for the job" situation. Often 8va's are used for when you want to raise a single note or chord one time, and that would be much more readable than a separate staff or ledger lines. It seems like it's a random access vs sequential read type thing. 8va is better if you're jumping to a far octave with no intermediate context; stacked staves would be better for when the melody incrementally takes you there.

I'd love to see what the equivalents of both approaches would be in this notation.

A single staff can switch between different clefs, if you ever want to redfine what lines mean what notes. Then you can switch back to the normal treble clef.

That double treble clef is called the super-treble clef and I've only ever seen it in the appendix of a book called the science of sound.

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