I\u2019ve now finished the \u201cPre-Advanced I\u201d course in the Simply Piano app\u2014but I felt like that particular course was too easy, which is to say I felt like it came too late in the sequence. (Whereas the last two or three courses that I did were hard enough to be right at the edge of my ability to get through them.)<\/p>\r\n
The entire Pre-Advanced I course is focused on sixteenth notes and key signatures. To me, those seem like really basic things\u2014though that may just be because I\u2019ve been familiar with them since I was a kid.<\/p>\r\n
I guess the app didn\u2019t even cover scales in different keys until a few courses ago, in Intermediate IV. But that also seems a little late in the sequence to me.<\/p>\r\n
I think that despite everything I love about this app, the designers and I have a basic disagreement about theory.<\/p>\r\n
The app is very<\/em> focused on teaching by way of well-known pieces of music\u2014it teaches a little bit of new notation, or a new hand position, or a new chord, or a new technique, and then has you learn that new thing by learning to play a piece of famous or popular music that (in their arrangement of the piece) uses it. And that\u2019s great in many ways\u2014it\u2019s super practical, it helps make the learning fun, in some cases it helps you learn because you already know how the music is supposed to sound. (There are a lot of new-to-me songs here, but also a lot that I had heard and liked before.)<\/p>\r\n But they leave out all the theoretical scaffolding that would give the practical stuff something to build on. They never mention intervals. They never mention time signatures. They don\u2019t mention key signatures (or 16th notes) until the 28th course of a 32-course sequence (two years into my using the app). They mention the phrase \u201cchord progression\u201d at one point, in passing, but they don\u2019t really explain why particular chords would be part of a particular progression.<\/p>\r\n So there\u2019s a whole lot of \u201cwe\u2019ll help you learn to do this\u201d but very little of \u201cwe\u2019ll help you understand why to do this.\u201d<\/p>\r\n I\u2019m sure that for lots of people, the why would just be a distraction. But for me, it\u2019s an important piece. I already knew some of it going into the app, but there\u2019s other stuff that I need to learn on my own.<\/p>\r\n I\u2019m seeing a connection here with tech writing. We\u2019ve been focusing a lot lately on showing readers how to do stuff (\u201ctask-based documentation\u201d), and in most cases I think that\u2019s the right approach; most of the time, when someone comes to the documentation, what they want is an answer to a specific question, usually along the lines of \u201chow do I do this thing that I want to do?\u201d<\/p>\r\n But we\u2019ve therefore been de-emphasizing conceptual documentation. And even though most of the time most readers don\u2019t want conceptual documentation and won\u2019t read it if it\u2019s offered to them, I still worry that we\u2019re underserving the readers who do want to learn the underpinnings\u2014how things work, why they work that way, etc.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[93,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-documentation","category-music"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19257"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19260,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19257\/revisions\/19260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}