tvl-depot/website/sandbox/learnpianochords

Learn Piano Chords (LPC)

Are you a musician looking for a more effective way to improve your craft? Maybe you're a music teacher looking to create useful exercises to give your students.

Studying music theory can be a fruitful undertaking, but it can often overwhelm or bore students. I think that if practicing is enjoyable, students will practice more. Practice doesn't make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect. Learn Piano Chords is a web app that lowers the barrier to practicing and internalizing music theory.

How does it work?

1. Grab a cell phone or a laptop and your instrument.
2. Open a web browser and visit the Learn Piano Chords app (URL and app forthcoming).
3. Set the tempo (i.e. pace) at which you would like to practice.
4. Set the target duration of your session.
5. Select the key(s) and chord(s) you would like to practice.
6. LPC will display chords at various rhythmic intervals during your practice session. It is your job to play these chords in time before the next chord appears.

Highlights

Here are some useful features of LPC:

• Tempo: Set the rate at which LPC displays chords.
• Predefined practice sessions: LPC offers users a few practice sessions to get users started. The goal, however, is to teach users to create their own bespoke practice sessions. LPC aims to foster a community of practitioners who curate and share their practice sessions.
• Whitelist / blacklist: Construct the set of chords you would like to practice. Let's say you only want to practice triads in the keys of F, C, and G. Would you also like to avoid diminished chords? Or maybe you only want to practice major-7th chords for all keys. LPC supports all of these scenarios and many others. You can save these chord configurations to reuse them at any time. You can also share chord configurations with other LPC users if you find the practice useful.
• Inversions: Every chord has inversions. For instance, every triad (i.e. chord composed of three notes) has three inversions: root, second, and third positions. LPC acknowledges all of the positions in which chords may appear and helps you study all, some, or none of these inversions.
• Harmony: LPC understands basic harmony and can sort the chords you would like to train in various harmonious permutations.
• Chaos-mode: Feeling confident? Throw the classical notions of harmony to the wayside and use LPC in "chaos-mode" where LPC samples randomly from the Circle of Fifths.

Developing

If you're interested in contributing, the following will create an environment in which you can develop:

$ nix-shell
$ elm-live -- src/Main.elm --output=elm.js