Note-reading — a vital skill

There are important payoffs to mastering this vital skill early in your musical career.

One of the biggest is getting rid of an annoying distraction: the need to laboriously decipher notation when you are trying at the same time both to cope with technical challenges and to express musical feelings.

A secure grasp of note-reading:

• Builds confidence
• Encourages the development of sight-reading
• Makes the most of other investments in music, such as lessons

Developing a new skill invariably begins with a phase in which one’s full and active attention is needed — even to do it badly! Fortunately, one quickly progresses to a transitional period during which the task demands less and less of the conscious mind. Given time and persistence, this gives way in turn to a final state in which the skill is fully internalized — ‘automatic’ — and can be kept up with a minimum of ongoing effort. The entire focus of NoteCard, key to almost every feature and detail, is to get users to that third stage of mastery as quickly as possible.

Developing a new skill invariably begins with a phase in which
one’s full and active attention is needed — even to do it badly!

Obviously people can learn to read music without the help of NoteCard. That includes you too (and your kids). It will probably just take quite a bit of extra time that you could have spent on exploring new music, or developing your tone. If you are paying for music lessons, you will have to devote lesson time week after week to reviewing the notes rather than finding out what to do with them.

With NoteCard, in contrast, you can learn the notes on your own time, under the patient tutelage of the computer, and much more efficiently than by other means, including both physical and ordinary software-based flashcards. When you consider that the Paid version of NoteCard costs a good deal less than a single half-hour music lesson at typical U.S. rates — and the Free version is even less than that! — we hope you will at least give the product a try to see how well it works for you.