Hi there - have started learning with a few locals in January (fortunate to have Elaine Allen at the helm).
Being more than halfway through my 3 score & 10, the fingers really do have as mind of their own. I can hear the tune in my head, but there’s a lot of unplanned, shall we say ‘ornamentation’?
Anyhow - to try to help make the connection between my head & my fingers, I put together a rough & ready program in Scratch which others may find useful - you can get it at
That’s neat that anyone with a modern browser can not only use it, but customize it. My sister is working with some students in a coding club, and some high schoolers were using Snap! which seems quite similar, but more powerful as far as computer science concepts go. I’m not making whistles, but I wonder how hard it would be to do those types of calculations in this environment. Or what other tools might be doable and useful.
Yes it’s a great little language. Scratch did all the basics that I needed, plus I found that using Puffin web browser on my android phone allowed me to run it without switching on the PC (Chrome on android will not run the Scratch program).
So, regarding how this has helped the tootiling…in a week, concentrating on the lower register, I’ve been able to shorten the time gap from the default down to 1.5 secs, maintaining similar accuracy. I’m wanting to get that gap right down in time to almost continuous.
As an aside, it’s funny how the brain can work - some of the recorded notes played have something about the audio that makes them distinct from the others, and my brain started registering those nuances with the fingering! Now I either keep the volume very low or set the phone in the other room which eliminates that problem.
