How should one work with missing digital staff on entry level keyboard?
I am currently trying to find a good entry level keyboard for getting back to learning to play after 20 years. I had a few years of grade school classes playing a brass instrument and some self taught time with a keyboard when I was an adolescent.
A lot of the entry level keyboards have a 'notation' section (as they call it) on the digital display which I worry might actually be a bit of a crutch to learning to mentally transpose sheet music to finger placement. I was pretty reliant on this feature when I was teaching myself 20 years ago, so I am naturally looking for a keyboard which has it now too.
However, the keyboard I am wanting to get (for other reasons) does not have this notation section which has me reflecting if I really should even allow myself to have something that may actually be a crutch to learning. Though with so many entry level keyboards having it, I am also wondering if it's a good thing to have available and if relying on it is just fine.
In a formal education setting, would an instructor generally shun reliance on the digital notation display? Or is it a good learning tool? Bit of both?
Image below shows an example of what this notation looks like on the display (left side):
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You are not doing anything fundamentally wrong but relying on something like this for more than a short period of time can be detrimental to the development of your playing and reading skills. First, I would assume a display like that pays no mind to keys so accidentals may not be interpreted correctly. Secondly, you are turning a 2 step process of looking at a note on a chart and playing it to a 3 step process, adding the step of looking at the display to see if the note you played matches the note on the paper. In the long run you will be better off working on making the connection directly from paper to fingers and focusing on the sound to tell you if something is right or wrong.
Remember, music has been around for thousands of years but none of this technology existed 50 or 60 years ago. Musicians managed to get by before the advent of electronics. Let’s use technology to our benefit but not as a crutch. Let’s make sure we are the ones doing the actual learning and playing.
There's nothing WRONG about consulting that sort of display. But - like an earlier generation's sticky labels 'naming' the notes of a piano keyboard - it's a stage you need to get past pretty quickly. The music you'll want to play is distributed as notation. Deal with it!
It's not particularly difficult to learn to read music. One starts with somewhat simple stuff and then adds stuff as needed. Ordinary music notation is quite flexible and quick to read with a bit of practice. Teoria has lots of good stuff as do other sites. www.teoria.com/ Reading music allows one access to a vast amount of stuff. Also one can share music with people across language borders (and apparently across time as we still perform music from the 1300s and before.)
The most important thing to remember is that (with the usual staff notation) pitch is represented vertically and time goes horizontally.
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