I have stumbled across this book many times, I have read it. It's the single most controversial book that I've read about piano technique and playing that I've found.

The author, is not even a player himself (!!!). There's a great summary of reviews about the book here (https://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php?topic=38247.0), if you're starting into piano, stay away, get a decent teacher.

> In summary, the process of learning this genre consists of practicing the chords and scales sufficiently so that, given a melody, you can “feel” the right and wrong chords that go along with it.

That's only scratching the surface and will not get you playing jazz. Listening to and copying the greats - Bird, Monk, Evans, Coltrane, Rollins, et al. That's how you learn to play jazz.

>It is clear that this genre is here to stay, has great educational and practical value, is relatively easy to learn, and can be a lot of fun.

Relatively easy to learn??? Clearly the author hasn't or isn't playing jazz.

I read it a couple years ago and it completely changed how I approach practicing.

By finger numbering I mean the standard scheme where thumb=1, index=2, ..., pinky=5, and the notes on the sheet music have these numbers.

This is the biggest mystery to me. I understand there is not a One True Canonical Fingering for a given sequence of notes. But some fingerings make the music much easier than others.

Wish some HN coder genius would write a program that given sheet music as input, outputs the top 1-3 recommended fingerings for that music with explanations for which rules were applied.

I also really enjoy the tone of this book. I think the author might actually be manic. I can't find it now in this online version, but in my decade old printed edition I remember in one of the sections he describes a problem his book might cause in the world where by teaching people to tune their own pianos so well, you might be concerned that it would lead to putting piano tuners out of business. He then insists you should not worry about this imagined problem because his piano teaching method is so great, that there will be orders of magnitude more piano students thanks to his book, which would lead to ever higher job security for piano tuners/technicians as not every student will have the time or interest to actually tune their pianos, despite now knowing how to do so very well thanks to this book.

Amazing stuff.

While writing it, I discovered that piano pedagogy had never been researched, documented, and analyzed properly

is totally wrong. There's a Piano Pedagogy group just in the Bay Area, and lots of books on it.

I was an Adult Beginner, which is sorta a Thing. My teacher had about 12 adult students, and we had separate recitals from the kids. The hidden reason for this is, you don't want to hear some 9-year-old kid who plays better than you ever will.

Almost all of the other adults had played as a child and given it up. Many teachers won't take adults like me because they have unrealistic ideas about how good they're going to be. The truth is, you are not going to be very good, and lots of people who are orders of magnitude better than you can't make any real money playing piano, because that level of skill is so common.

The interesting thing about how our brains work is: I could memorize effortlessly, but I couldn't sight read worth shit. There are other people who are the exact opposite.

Lastly, one thing they said really resonated with me:

The first thing that must be done is to eliminate the habits of stopping and backtracking (stuttering), at every mistake. The best time to develop the skill of not stopping at every mistake is when you begin your first piano lessons.

OMG, in the recitals there was one lady who just had to play every note correctly, no matter how many times she had to try. She stopped at every mistake and "corrected" it, until you wanted to scream at her.

>(...) Mental Play (...) It is almost unbelievable that such an essential skill has been mostly neglected by piano teachers.

which is a top "crank red flag".

In the first movement of Apposionata Op. 57, there's a pattern that goes from hand to hand, in groups of five. Difficult for the left hand. So my teacher had me learn it in the right hand too, but inverted.

So in the left hand it went Db Eb G Eb Db. In the right hand that would be Eb Db A Db Eb, an octave up. Mirror image. You'd play both at the same time.

It sounded awful (and then kind of cool after a while) but it worked really well.

http://www.pianopractice.org/ , suggest a link change.

Now, my wife is completing her education degree and I see a lot of this approach being implemented in K-12: identify and focus on weaknesses; use your strengths to enhance your weakness; spend time on the big problems; balancing holistic approaches with concise methods, etc. All seem obvious and yet I didn't have a single teacher in music or otherwise suggest any of them to me.

Moreover, Chang's a techie—an experienced scientist—so there's no bullshit or unnecessary padding here. As such, he'll appeal to many HN readers who tinkle the ivories from time to time and who'd like to improve their technique.

P.S.: I found his piano tuning info/techniques most interesting. As a hacker who couldn't leave well enough alone and who managed to put my old upright well out of wack and sounding like bar piano out of an old Western movie, this info would have been absolutely invaluable.

Since publication when electronic aids were expensive, there's apps you can put on your phone for little or no money. Pitchlab Pro is excellent, but there may be patent issues in your jurisdiction. Also you now have to go through Amazon.

These days YouTube offers different interpretations of just about everything. It gives you something to aim for.

Several years later I bought a cheap 49-key midi keyboard and fired up YouTube, still going and improving every day.

Just do it, really; sit down and learn how to play something you like, your way.

https://www.instagram.com/serenepianist/

serene was a hacker at google/tor/cmu and then went deep into piano and is an amazing concert pianist. she loved this book!

I’m a piano beginner and my lingering anxieties are:

1. Am I building bad habits?

2. Am I learning in first gear without realizing it?

It fits with the current zeitgeist, where clickbait is everywhere, even in respected newspapers.

It is one reason why instrumentalists spend so much time practicing things like scales and arpeggios. Because in practice 90% of music is made of these or small variations on them, so once these are "muscle memory" you truly don't think about fingerings any more.

While I am NOT claiming to be "some coder genius", a program that does exactly this is something on my "projects to-do" list. My partner (who's improving her piano skills) keeps crying out for more sheet music with fingerings...

Is there already a canonical set of rules to apply? My approach is to find fingerings through a sort of beam search, using a utility function for how hard it is to move between points in a 10 dimensional "finger space".

I'm sure this approach is Probably Wrong or at least Overkill, but it's the most mathematically interesting way... :)

An optimal fingering for n notes played one at a time by an F fingered hand can be found in nF^2 time, or I believe n(F^F)^2 if you allow F note chords. "Optimal" in the sense of minimizing a cost function defined in terms of state transitions: c(t, f, t', f') is the cost of playing note t with finger f, followed by note t' with finger f'. E.g. c(a3, 1, b3, 2) < c(a3, 1, b3, 5) because it's unpleasant to scrunch your pinky (5) that close to your thumb. (Notably, t/t' do not mean t_i and t_j, two notes in the piece.) There are papers quantifying such cost functions, apparently.

Side rant -

Having grown up on violin, but learning piano as an adult, (and as a programmer), it kills me to index fingers from 1 (thumb) to 5 (pinky). Violin doesn't use the thumb, so the pointer to pinky are 1->4! Worse, as a Suzuki violinist, I hear (to some approximation) the number of the finger I'm thinking about while playing. Worse yet, I read bass by "adding two" notes to treble, so I get a nice off-by-two to think about with my off-by-one.

I should, uh, probably get a teacher.

If you look ahead a bit at a line of music, you can sort of anticipate how many fingers you'll need in the direction you're going and that helps plan which ones to use. But as others have said, knowing how to play scales contributes a lot to your planning skills.

You must first access the corpus of data on fingerings. AFAICT that is an oral history passed among piano teachers.

Even then, you must account for how different fingering approaches quantize to various tempo changes. E.g., there's a tempo beyond which I can start throwing my thumb (well, my arm) past my pinky in the development section of the last movement of Beethoven's Appassionata sonata. Below that tempo the fingering is basically nonsense.

You could probably put together some basic set of rules for recommended amateur fingerings. Even there, I think the quantization to tempo is sufficiently complicated that you'd risk creating something like an ML algo that merely improves at persuasively rationalizing arbitrary fingerings.

Edit: I just looked back at the passage and it's actually throwing my index finger past my ring finger. Funny enough, I tried the same passage throwing my thumb past my pinky-- it works fairly well at a fast enough tempo and is awkward and error prone if played too slowly. In either case, the same logic applies.

I grew up with a piano in the house, have had sheet music for loads of instruments (played sax, piano, guitar, family had trumpet/clarinet/misc in house too). Have taken music theory classes, performed in bands in middle/high schools and college.

I've never seen sheet music have 'fingering' info ever.

Can someone point me to examples of what is being referred to here?

How do highly-skilled pianist come up with fingering? Are there any kind of rules? I think there are. But it may be so automatic that they don't actively think about them.

On the other hand, if we have a large quantity of high-quality sheets with fingering labeled, we can train a transformer which is supposed to learn the implicit rules pretty well.

A problem may be that once fingering becomes intuitive, then there's no incentive to write it down, and you might not even be able to articulate why you chose a particular finger.

I only think about it when I'm trying to work out a difficult passage, and then I'm usually thinking of intervals and shifts that afford me the best chance of playing in tune. Fortunately that's not an issue on the piano, but the idea of finding an ergonomic and less mistake-prone fingering is probably a similarity.

On the other hand you might be surprised at how little it might cost to have a pianist or piano student number some music for you. At least on cello and bass music, when material has fingerings, they only need to indicate the ones that are non-obvious.

That said, many fingering choices are practical and dictated by the geography of the keyboard and the oddities of our hand anatomy. Armed with a knowledge of the fingering of all of the major and minor scales, the patterns and paradigms encountered in actual compositions become clearer. I recommend MacFarren's scale book but there are others. Beyond pattern recognition and an attempt to understand the musical intent, there's just trial and error. When approaching a new work, I'll spend quite a bit of time trying options in ambiguous passages. It's time well-spent. Pro-tip: don't write in every single finger number. It creates too much visual distraction on the page. Write in only when there's an inflection point. If you have a descending passage in the RH that is 5-4-3-2-1-3-2-1, let's say, just write the 5...1-3 or possibly just 5...3. String players are the absolute best at this concept, only annotating finger numbers when there's a shift of position or an odd extension.

True. For any given passage, there are at least two different One True Canonical Fingerings, and no matter what you do you will be Wrong and criticized without mercy for your ridiculous incompetence.

This isn't so much of a problem if your intention is not playing professionally. Learning easy and intermediate pieces is a lot of fun. Also making your own music using a MIDI keyboard and a DAW.

But I'm still having so much fun!! Playing simple piano pieces or fooling around with synth or arranger or playing with my kids etc. Piano has such a low barrier of entry to just tinkle around, and such phenomenal keyboards can be had for so little money used if you research a bit, I feel totally spoiled :-). There's YouTube videos and online lessons and awesome books for any style.

My one tip to adult learners - understand that music theory is not the same as learning to play is not the same as learning music notation / sight reading. Traditional music teachers with captive audience of 10 year olds whose parents force them to attend, start with notes reading which has no pay off for unbelievable amount of time. As a busy motivated adult there's no shame and lots of advantages to first learn your way around the instrument and a few songs or improv, even some good theory, before conittibg yourself to grind and learn by rote of music notation. It is NOT intuitive and you won't benefit from it immediately. Especially as piano has different clef for left and right hand... Mostly Because grouchy 18th century old Austrian white males hate you! :-D

I had a college instrumental performance professor yell at me to "sit still" because this was happening all the time at our weekly recital hour, it was driving me crazy, and I would jerk, or shake my head or hang it, or facepalm, or clench my fists.

They were right to call me out because I was being rude and I toned down my reactions after that, but... ugh. I hate that the professors tolerated that — it was such a disservice to their students.

None of the above refute the parent's statement. They author is aware there are such things as piano pedagody groups and books. Key word here is "properly" (which might be accurate or not, but that's what should be refuted).

You would think you could play at rehearsals for a community theater group. Those are really low budget organizations and a lot of the staff doesn't even get paid. The rehearsal pianist got paid $50 for the entire show.

Even that guy is way better than most of us will ever be.

oh man, that is frustrating! Somebody once said that a good musician will make their mistakes sound musical. Thinking that you must stop to correct a mistake is a fundamental misunderstanding about how music is perceived. I don't blame her though, I was once like this too. I think this is the default behavior for many adult beginners especially.

A surprise I had is that 9 yo is an advanced age in musical spheres. There’s international young pianist competitions won by 10~11 year olds. They are usually bound to become pro players, so not the average kid in your local music school, but it’s a good frame of mind for thinking about how good a 10 yo can be.

I live in Italy, here there are two kind of musicians: 1) conservatory majors, with really really strong "fundamentals" but none to zero improvisation skills 2) other people who followed a learning path of anglo-saxon derivation, usually they have some degree of play-by-ear and improvisation skills but they show a severe lack on fundamentals skills. By "fundamentals" I mean sight reading (meant as sight reading on first sight, everyone can read with enough time), ability to sing what you want to play in tune before playing it, strong inner sense of time and subdivision, knowledge of theory and harmony. Side note: if you ever see musicians perform in Italy (maybe this applies to other European countries like Germany and France too) there is a very easy way to recognize if they have a classical / conservatory background: look at their feet. If they tap a foot there is a very strong chance they have no classical background as it is seen as the kind of baby wheels thing that prevents solfege from developing a strong inner sense of time.

Back on topic: as you can see there are these big two big subsets of music learning. What I'm doing is simply mix them: I study sight reading and solfege (trying to sing in tune) but at the same time I spend time transcribing by ear and following improvisation methods. There are some very strong sinergies in this: the ability to sing (in tune, not mumbling it) makes transcribing orders of magnitude easier. Same applies to knowledge of harmonic motions. Doing progressive reading exercises vastly improved my ability to play and understand odd rhythmic patterns to the point I can actually sense the lack of precision they have when I play in a garage band with my friends (not professional musicians but they have been playing for more than 20 years).

To make an even simpler example: I can play without looking at my guitar, a lot of people can't. This feel a lot like seeing people unable to type on a computer keyboard without looking at it.

As for learning in first gear, don't be afraid to make mistakes, as long as you are thinking about the mistakes and analyzing them, rather than blindly repeating them as "a thing that is hard so I will work in it later while I approach the parts of the piece that I enjoy." The way to improve is by hurling yourself at something too difficult for you, and then slowly improving your technique once you are able to analyze why a particular bit of music you're working on is beyond you.

To play a piece *perfectly, it is like wiping a glass window. You want to play the piece perfectly, every. single. time. So as you build the piece in your head, you cannot leave the equivalent of 'you missed a spot.' If your technique manages to be perfect, clear glass, the listener can 'see' through it to the music. It is dangerous that you already know the piece in your head, because your memory of the music can trump the mistake even as you are making it, because you hear 'how the piece should be' rather than how you're playing it. It's imperative to listen to recordings of your work as you polish it; only at the level of mastery does this become a superfluous tool. By listening to it back, you effectively can 'see' all the spots on the window that you are trying to wipe away.

Finally, there are only two types of playing the piano: practice, which involves deliberate and labored cleaning-up of your weaknesses and mistakes, and playing, which is the exhibition of your efforts to make something beautiful and perfect. The book does address this; most amateurs enjoy playing more than they practice, so they play a lot and fool themselves into thinking they are practicing (I am very guilty of this) and rarely practice, so their playing sounds like they need more practice :)

What's the alternative approach? Repeatedly play the entire song making mistakes at the crux, but insisting on playing the easy parts and pushing through the difficult ones?

However, it seems like it would be a motivation killer. I'd have thought there was more emotional value in getting through the whole piece, to hear each part in context, to "follow the story".

Can you talk about this method's interaction with your motivation? Would it suit an absolute beginner?

(I'm commenting from my imagination rather than experience. I almost always rely on a sequencer to play for me ;-) )