Using Linnstrument to learn Music Theory

[michaeljk1963]

This is really interesting and helpful advice. Thank you! I will mess around with this. I have only ever really used a piano key as an input device for sound (other than programming sound with step sequencers and changing the configuration of the pads on the HydraSynth Desktop module). I haven't really played around with how the pads are set up on the Linnstrument, so this will be a good way to explore that (I do remember how to do a reset, though, which is good)!

[MilesParker]

Great discussion. The grid system is so natural to me that as I noted elsewhere this is exactly the instrument I've been looking for for years. I've had mine just since xmas and am already feeling quite comfortable with chord shapes, major scale runs etc.. but that's no surprise given I'm a guitar player (or at least I've been pretending for a long time, hahah). (As an aside: What is a surprise to me is that I'm also gravitating to the aug 4th (+6) tuning even though I'm used to the scale shapes for fourths. They are exactly the same if you think along a diagonal.)

I wanted to turn this conversation in a slightly different direction, perhaps this is better as a new thread..or has been covered well elsewhere (looked but didn't see anything directly addressing):

The two major factors that make LinnStrument a pleasure when it comes to practicing music theory [is] the ability to light up custom note patterns/scales. This means once you learn a certain pattern for a chord or an interval it's going to be played the same everywhere on the instrument. And you can quickly toggle lights on and off to help visualize the patterns that these chords and intervals make.

...

In the end you don't want the lit notes to become a crutch, you want them to be a tool for learning the muscle memory. There is a pre-built feature that lets you toggle between different scales, but I might recommend punching in the notes by hand at first to keep that theory side of your brain activated.

This is the crux of the question I've been puzzling with.. the merits of transposing vs. keeping a fixed C rooted layout. The lazy me (I'm a software developer so "lazy" means "smart" to me) wants to simply transpose everything to the key and mode I want so I get all of the "nice" notes lit up for my untrained brain. The ambitious me wants to learn to move freely outside the boundaries of those notes and needs a lot of help learning to sight read.

This essential contradiction seems to be at the heart of what I gather is a major pedagogical controversy in academic music circles -- whether to teach students relative Do-Re-Mi (German and a lot of N. American systems) vs Fixed (Romantic + top conservatories). see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solf%C3%A8ge for way more than you probably want to know about that..

Here are the advantages I can see to either approach:

_Transposing Layout_

1. You have a clear map for exactly what notes make sense to play, regardless of key or mode. (Duh!) It's easier and more immediatly rewarding.
2. Of course, it's hard to ignore the fact that Roger built the Linnstrument with those amazing lighted up squares precisely so that you can do things like transpose, why not get your money's worth?
3. You (arguably) gain a greater grasp of the deeper aspects of music theory because you can visually (not just kinesthetically) focus on what's "really" important -- the relationship between notes and chords, not the actual pitch.
4. It's quite easy to change keys as needed. (But is this really practical during performance?)

_Fixed Layout_

1. You can directly and consistently translate location and lighting on keyboards to musical staff, greatly facilitating visual -> muscle memory for sight reading. Of course, unlike Linnstrument, musical notation is not nicely transposed for you! (Spoiler: this is the only one that I really care about.)
2. Your brain has to learn to do the heavy lifting itself, and actually deeply understand what is happening vs. just "playing the white keys". i.e. you don't get subtly trapped in diatonic land.*
3. Unlike Piano, you are still able to utilize same chord structure and scale patterns, perhaps leading you toward more of a grasp of how western scale system works.
4. For those trained in fixed approach, key changes are no problem, or more correctly no more of a problem than playing anything but C Major!
5. Related, when improvising with others or playing complex atonal pieces or whatever you don't have to try to guess what the tonic is or experience the cognitive dissonance of picking an arbitrary key and thinking it's the appropriate one.

* "Those trained in fixed-do will argue that their act is the analogue of reading aloud in a language. Just as one reads this very sentence without parsing it grammatically, so too fixed-do is the direct sounding of the music. Where the movable-do system requires constant real-time analysis of the tonality and modulations in the score, in fixed-do the musician uses knowledge of the changing tonality to understand for example that the pitch class c-natural is the supertonic in B-Flat major or minor, and the dominant when the music modulates to F-major, but the c-note remains the same pitch."

So what I'm super curious about is what approach experienced musicians / linnstrument players are using?

And taking it further, are there ways folks have found to find a good balance /hybrid between each of the approaches?

As a note regarding that that one of the cool things about guitar is with capo or barre chords you can use same shapes, but the physicality of where you are remains essentially static. I see that you can achieve the same effect on Linnstrument by always changing the pitch and lights tranpose to the same value.

[zachaudioguy]

So what I'm super curious about is what approach experienced musicians / linnstrument players are using?

And taking it further, are there ways folks have found to find a good balance /hybrid between each of the approaches?

As a note regarding that that one of the cool things about guitar is with capo or barre chords you can use same shapes, but the physicality of where you are remains essentially static. I see that you can achieve the same effect on Linnstrument by always changing the pitch and lights tranpose to the same value.

I like the direction your mind is going, this is a topic that's certainly been on my mind as I learn the LinnStrument. I've definitely had to get over a very serious impostor syndrome in the back of my mind, 'cause I've heard all the common phrases before about what a real musician or guitarist might or might not do (and those voices tend to favor fixed layout in my head). But at the end of the day, music is for me and I only have to live up to my own standards and goals. And I've come to embrace technology at the maximum.

I'm currently more in favor of the transposing layout. If I'm doing improv, I like to comfortably maximize the full range of the keypad, I guess similar to when a singer chooses the key for a song so it's comfortably in their range. When I played guitar, if I had the option of playing everything in E, I would have taken it because I loved noodling around on minor pentatonic around the 12th to 15th fret.

Even with a transposing layout, it still helps me to know the theory. I might be playing in C and have the LinnStrument set to that, but as soon as I play C minor pentatonic over top, I'm playing non-diatonic notes. I know I need to flat the 3rd and 7th and I'm familiar with those patterns so long as I know where the root note is. Same if I want to throw a harmonic/melodic minor lick in. I have the feeling that as I progress, I'll probably start turning more lights off and have just the root note in the end .

In the end, I want the instrument to work for me. In the same way that if I were a guitarist playing songs in C# Major often, I'd ditch standard tuning or use a capo.

If you really wanted to go tech maximalist in a live setting you could automate all of these transposing key changes with MIDI. This is not uncommon practice today where most gear is MIDI controlled and setlists are pre programmed to automatically switch effects on and off synced to the beat. There was an interesting Rick Beato video covering this not long ago

[John the Savage]

To transpose the lights or not to transpose the lights? That is the question.

To which I pose the following question:
How many songs stay entirely within a single key, and only use the diatonic chords of that parent key?

Sooner of later, you're going to have to step outside of that box; and when you do, you'll need to know where you're going and why.

Again, all roads lead to Rome.
Study, learn, practice... Be free.

Cheers!

“Are you willing to do the work?”—Prince

[monch1962]

Great topic, and I'm struggling with the same set of pros and cons that @MilesParker mentions. I'm also a lazy software developer (laziness is definitely a strength in that world), so I'm open to taking this to an extreme by e.g. playing everything in C to get the benefit of the pretty lights and using something like Mozaic on iOS to transpose it on the fly to the key I want.

I'm also aware you can send MIDI In to the Linnstrument to reprogram the lights from a sequencer for each song, which is another option. I'm slightly surprised nobody's released a bunch of MIDIs to reconfigure lights for each key and mode, including exotic scales - I might do it myself some day, or write a little Mozaic script to do it.

That said, I have no time for Milli Vanilli and Ashlee Simpson so clearly even I have limits when it comes to musical credibility

For now, I'm leaving the Linnstrument in its default lights setup while I learn my way around the grid. Once I get comfortable with that and start playing with others, I'll have to decide how to approach this.

I'd also appreciate hearing others' views on this, including the No True Scotsman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman) viewpoint

[MilesParker]

...I'm open to taking this to an extreme by e.g. playing everything in C to get the benefit of the pretty lights and using something like Mozaic on iOS to transpose it on the fly to the key I want.

Just to double-check, you know you can do that right from Octave/Transpose, right? That's what _true_ Linnstrumentalists do, laddie. Or perhaps you mean automagically, i.e. by detecting where you are in a piece.

Seriously though, I had no idea about Mozaic, that is wicked cool. I wanted to play with some midi stuff myself, but was assuming I'd need to learn Swift / iOS app dev, which I'd be happy to do but don't really have time for rn.

[monch1962]

@MilesParker, you're making it way too complicated. You think a good software developer would push that Octave/Transpose button when he can have MIDI do it for him? You need to focus more on getting your laziness chops together

For me, it's not so much transposing the key, but remembering which of the scales is which in the scale selector. From memory there's 9 to choose from - I can remember "major" is the first, and "natural minor" and "harmonic minor" are the next 2, then I go blank after that. If I want to set the lights for the "mutant Phrygian backwards #13 b9 decaf underarm" scale - hmm, I'm in trouble. Way easier to program a little MIDI script to turn the pretty lights on and off for me in that case!

At 60yo, I'm not expecting my memory to improve over the next few years so I'd better get across all these little tricks while I can still remember how to tie my shoe laces.

Mozaic is really nice, quite powerful, and very simple once you get used to the syntax. If you want to play with MIDI stuff on iOS, it's by far the fastest way to get a result. I wrote a little script to turn my LaunchPad X's single MIDI channel output into MPE-like data (routing each pad to a unique channel on the fly, including pressure data) in about 1-2 hours. Just playing around with that tool and seeing what I could do with per-pad pressure info convinced me that I wanted a Linnstrument, which would give me 3 parameters per pad instead of 1 to play with. The Mozaic patch is at https://patchstorage.com/lp-to-mpe/ if you're interested in checking out how it works under the covers.

[spartanclowntide]

Hello All, I wrote a Mozaic script not long ago that has the sort of functions discussed here. I’ve been meaning to post it but then it came to writing some documentation and it slipped a bit… Finding this thread, seems a bit rude not to chuck it out there in case anyone here finds it interesting or useful.

https://patchstorage.com/linnstrulights-101/

Here’s the documentation I did finally write, for some idea what it does.

“This script calculates musical intervals and colours the pads of a Linnstrument according to interval and a set of predefined scales.
To do this it must identify the root or key of what is being played.
When playing one note at a time then by default that is the root. When playing more notes together there are two root detection methods we can use. Using the lowest played note as the root or using the first played note when playing legato, this is useful when playing chords if the root is not the bass note.

We can lock on to a key using a MIDI command (CC67) or from the settings page. It’s possible to colour intervals from either the perspective of what notes are notes being played or from the key we are locked to. ‘Colors Follow Play’ has a MIDI command (CC68) or toggle from settings.

Only notes in the selected scale are lit with either the entire board being lit or just the notes being played.
The knobs on the left select scale. The top left knob has set number of predefined scales with the bottom one selecting custom scales. Custom scales can be entered by MIDI note, play the scale and it will be recorded, or use the on screen pads.
Pressing shift will clear the current custom scale and toggle on ‘enter by MIDI note’, pressing shift again will toggle this off. This command is also available through CC66.

The Color knobs cycle through a selection of colour schemes. The bottom one is a set of colour variations on my personally favourite layout. Personalise colours easily in the script.

You can use two instances of Mozaic to respond to the two splits independently. This takes a moment to set up. Make sure the MIDI channels assigned per split are the same in Mozaic as they are on the Linnstrument. Tap the Set Split pad. The split point is set using the knob. Tap again to return. It’s not necessary to set this up on both instances, simply press shift in the other instance to synchronise these settings.

Route the Linnstrument to Mozaic in both directions.”

[MilesParker]

This is amazing... looks like we have a whole cadre of aging software geek / aspiring-to-be-better musicians here, lol. I'm eager to try Mozaic whenever I get some time -- I've had this idea about turning any midi keyboard into a sequencer ala Arturia KeyStep, and this would be a great way to pilot it, but it will be a long time before I can get to that now given I have Linnstrument to play with.

I just got lead for Blue Bossa pretty down, and feel like I'm off to the races.* That's been a good way to play around with these approaches, since I'm learning Bach's Cello suite as well and Blue Bossa gives me a chance to explore improvisational lines. Interesting that I'm gravitating to mono lead given I'm generally chord focussed on guitar, and given Linnstrument focus on polyphonic control, heh. Anyway.. re: "to transpose or not to transpose" ...


I am seeing @JohntheSavage's point re: you'll have to move outside of the box eventually anyway, *and* I love that I can have a diagram of where the box is.

What I'm finding is that a mix works pretty well. I'm keeping main light on C and then turning on lights for key as a way to get familiar, i.e. if it's a flat D on staff I'll change that light, but not actually transpose. That way I'm gaining some understanding of a "fixed" layout (no actual transposition in that all notes play the same as default) _and_ I'm getting the nice aid of being able to move the "white keys" around, with the benefit of seeing as well as hearing the modes.

It would be nice if you could control each colour individually by scale note without scripting or having to manually set the whole keyboard -- then I could keep the light keys and add in key change notes in different colour. Maybe that would be something for Mozaic script, but I'd lean more toward hacking the Linnstrument source code instead, since I've looked at it and it's very nice clean code, kudos to Geert and other devs!

* Incidentally, it's just such a joy to play that using Logic Pro Studio Sax or Trumpet. I found all you have to do to get expression (mono) is change "dynamics via CC" on, and then change Dynamic Controller to 74-Brightness and helps to set Dynamic Controlled mode to Velocity & Controller or otherwise dynamics are a little too touchy for my taste. Considering you can get those for like 30-40 on Mainstage, it's a crazy bargain.

[Roger_Linn]

It would be nice if you could control each colour individually by scale note without scripting or having to manually set the whole keyboard -- then I could keep the light keys and add in key change notes in different colour.

While developing LinnStrument, I and early testers found that having so many colors wasn't very useful because it became too difficult to instantly see a reference point like C. Once you've used your multi-color arrangement for perhaps a month, it would be helpful if you could post here how useful you found it to be.

[MilesParker]

While developing LinnStrument, I and early testers found that having so many colors wasn't very useful because it became too difficult to instantly see a reference point like C. Once you've used your multi-color arrangement for perhaps a month, it would be helpful if you could post here how useful you found it to be.

Yep, kind of half-baked idea, could just be a visual cacophony ... on first getting it I thought it would be cool to say have thirds, fifths and sevenths each in their own colour, but that would be too much. I very much could see down the line turning most of the lights off as someone suggested.

And esp. with complex key signatures you could end up w/ nearly every light lit up. But I think you'd just need three colours, yellow for 'fixed' note in C major, blue for note in key but not in Cmaj and green for notes in both, such that panel would be all green in that case. Not sure what to do for root case.

Here it is for C Minor.. (purple is white in real life) in my preferred +6 -- I'm already doubting the utility of the approach, haha, but it might help with theory and it does actually "work" in the sense that I can easily run a C major scale using {white, green, yellow} and C minor with {white, blue, and green}. And a major (couldn't resist) plus would be that for sight reading, the staff lines all correspond to either yellow or green.

[Roger_Linn]

Interesting idea. I'd ask the same thing: please post here how you feel about it after using it for a month, including after playing transpositions over the same light pattern.

One other consideration is that splits are identified by different colors, so 3 colors per split could get confusing. One alternative method of identifying splits would be to use the same 3 colors for both split but with a dead column between them consisting of no lights or perhaps all white. The down side of this method is that you lose a playable column. You could experiment with this by using a custom light pattern.

[monch1962]

* Incidentally, it's just such a joy to play that using Logic Pro Studio Sax or Trumpet. I found all you have to do to get expression (mono) is change "dynamics via CC" on, and then change Dynamic Controller to 74-Brightness and helps to set Dynamic Controlled mode to Velocity & Controller or otherwise dynamics are a little too touchy for my taste. Considering you can get those for like 30-40 on Mainstage, it's a crazy bargain.

I've really gotta learn how to use Mainstage properly. I picked it up when I ordered my Linnstrument, then installed Roger's patches and was pretty impressed by how Linnstrument could control those patches, ...

... then I forgot all about Mainstage while I was consumed with learning how to use Loopy Pro

Thanks for the timely reminder @MilesParker. So much cool stuff, so little time...

[MilesParker]

Here's a version that addresses Roger's point re: splits ... I also like it better aesthetically. (It's of course messed up by the whole led cycling thing, but the lavender disc with white inside is all white.) You lose the yellow + blue = green thing, but it looks and feels pretty clear that white are the 'white keys' (C Major), dark is key only notes and light color in between are notes that are both in key and in C major. No root in this one since for me with +6 layout it's pretty obvious and after all piano C's don't have their own colours either. The "rule" would be "play light notes for C Major, play coloured notes for C Minor (or whatever current key is)".

I will play around with this and report back, we will see if my patience with changing keys and manually laying out splits lasts for a month.

[John the Savage]

I don't suppose any of you guys and gals play live? But if you've ever tried to stare at that many lights, onstage, in the dark, with the world spinning around; I promise your next endeavour will be to see how many lights you can do without.

Cheers!