(1) I learned to sight-sing Classical music when I was in elementary school and was a soprano, which mapped to everything being on the standard treble clef . . .
(2) I tend to prefer simplicity, since I think it is more elegant mathematically and easier to understand in terms of patterns . . .
The reality is that a grand piano has 88 keys, and if you put all the notes on a clef then it has to have approximately 44 lines, which makes it extraordinarily impractical and vastly confusing . . .
The traditional approach is to use a combination of bass and treble clefs augmented with notes above and below the lines, but this also is confusing at best and tends to encourage people to play piano as if it were a bass guitar and a flute, which is pretty strange . . .
In fact, I think that it is a mess no matter how it is done in any traditional way, which is yet another reason to do it a different way . . .
My strategy is based on realizing several decades ago that there are only 12 notes in equal temperament, and all of them are good . . .
When one goes beyond the basic 12 notes, the only difference is octaves, where for example in an one octave chromatic scale there are 13 notes but two of them differ only by octave . . .
From a mathematical and geometric perspective, this makes everything considerably easier, since instead of having to deal with 88 notes, one only needs to focus on 12 notes and 8 octaves, which is much easier in a virtual festival of ways . . .
When this is combined with the general fact that only the treble clef makes any intuitive sense to me in terms of being able to hear and to map notes in my mind, the most practical strategy for me is to map everything to the treble clef but in a way that is made relative by octave . . .
For example, I play electric bass guitar and have no difficulties imagining bass lines in my mind--which includes hearing and seeing the notes--but I see the notes on the treble clef rather than on a bass clef, so having to work with a bass clef when doing music notation requires me to do a translation or transformation that in turn requires me to remember some type of shortcut mnemonic, which I nearly always forget . . .
In theory, I should be able to remember whether the notes are moved downward or upward by a whole step, but I always forget and have to remind myself, which I usually do by putting a note on a treble clef and then finding its lower octave note on the bass clef . . .
However, several weeks ago I was working on a post to this FORUM on some topic that had something to do with ideas that will be nice for a future version of Notion, and one of the ideas that came to mind was having a way to set the relative octave for the treble clef, so that for example I could write an electric bass guitar part on a treble clef but the notes would be played at the correct lower octave for electric bass guitar . . .
And since I do a bit of research as part of writing posts, I checked the Notion 3 documentation and discovered that Notion 3 already does this, and it works very nicely, for sure . . .
For sure!
Currently, it is possible to do the mapping two octaves upward or downward, but it needs to be extended so that the treble clef can be set to any of the 8 octaves, where one way to do it is by specifying the octave for C in standard notation where the octave for C is indicated by an integer ranging from 1 to 8, where C4 maps to "Middle C" . . .
This will make it easier for me, since in addition to all the other simple rules, I relate everything to "Middle C" and generally avoid all the black keys unless I am being abstract, since it is easier to play the white keys and the white keys are arranged in a way that makes sense geometrically . . .
It is an interesting thing to ponder, and while there is merit to considering each note on a piano as being unique, it is not a very good strategy if one wants to understand the mathematics and geometry, although this is just one perspective of many . . .
Whether the "12 notes and 8 octaves" perspective makes any sense is another matter, but it makes playing lead guitar solos easier, since with a pair of DigiTech Whammy pedals set to one or two octave jumps and a Dunlop Cry Baby wah-wah pedal, you can play the same phrase several times and get different notes simply by working the motion pedals, which from my perspective is an excellent way to create a bit of time where one does basically mechanical things from memory while focusing on devising something actually different to do, which is a "look ahead" strategy that works very effectively when you are composing and playing a lead guitar solo in real-time on the fly, which is easy to do in terms of composing and playing but is virtually impossible to do in music notation, since there is so much happening that indicating all of it in music notation simply requires too much work to be practical, which is made all the more complex by including cascading echo units . . .
For example, how does one transcribe the lead guitar for this song in music notation?
http://www.surfwhammys.com/music/Dreamwalk_1.2.mp3
I have no idea!
There probably is a way to do it, since for example there are articulations for whammy bar stuff, but I think that it requires so much notation for foot pedal motions, string bends, guitar picking motions, and so forth and so on, that it is quite impractical, especially since it is more a matter of what I call "textures" than notes, which is fabulous . . .
Fabulous!
