Comment by Lio
4 hours ago
DAWs have been around for a few years now. If you were right and they really were 100 times easier to comprehend people would you not see people using printouts of piano rolls to read from?
What you’re suggesting is actually hundreds of years old from well before the existence of computers or DAWs but still no one is using it.
It turns out that judging the relative length of lines is difficult at speed compared to reading distinct symbols.
Also that 88 note piano rolls are a very space inefficient way of representing music on a page. Even a chromatic stave would be inefficient.
That really matters for people that want to sight read with other musicians and have as much viewable as possible in a compact area.
Finally, standard notation is very rich and evolved, as you’d expect for something in active use for so long. It has extensions for lots of instruments.
When people say notation can’t show X it’s usually that they just don’t know it can.
The only downside is that you have to learn it.
Because people doing piano have never seen DAWs, or never tried to use them? Because computers are bad, and piano is good. What a nonsense! And I've heard this argument hundred of times, and then at the end most music is produced/recorded/mastered using DAWs.
I have friends who have actual degree in music composition from actual conservatories, so most of them, professionals, who actually compose and produce actual music for movies, for games, for whatever you want - well all of them use DAWs and all of them are on Ableton or Logic or something along the line, and exactly ZERO of this nonsensical notation that takes more effort to master than music itself.
Most of the new music that gets composed is written in gantt charts or tracker rows, believe it or not. Dig around, and you'll find out.
Haha! I've been using Ableton since 2007, it's not something new or secret.
You can use a scrollable chart to display notes on screen and still want printed music for live use.
I'll bet you that if your friends are professionals and using live musicians to play their their compositions then they are distributing music to them in notation form not screenshots of Logic gantt charts.
There's nothing "nonsensical" about notation, it just serves a different purpose to a DAW screen.
If you want to read from paper and play what you read in real time, a Gantt chart is harder to use not easier. Use the right tool for the job.
Anything that can be played live, can be represented with music notation.
If anything does comes along that people want to do live then notation will be extended yet again to include it.