About the Music Innovator's Workshop Hi! It's a pleasure to welcome you to our website. I'm John M. Honeycutt, better known to my students as "Grampa John". With my talented associates, Dan and Sabrina, we hope that your visit will be a pleasant and productive one.  What is the Music Innovator's Workshop? First, this is a free site. There are no charges. We have nothing to sell. The Music Innovator's Workshop is an enterprise that provides new alternatives for teaching and learning of keyboard music through innovations in music notation and teaching methods. The site provides four series of keyboard preparatory instructional materials along with several thousand pages of sheet music in three innovative keyboard notations - all of which are much easier to learn and read than traditional music notation. This site is a way of sharing the benefits of these alternatives with my students - and with anyone else who may have an interest in them. Underlying all of our efforts to make music notation easier to learn and read is the conviction that music notation is a worthy visual art form as well as a practical means of conveying what sounds to play. Every effort has been made to make our music notation alternatives beautiful and interesting - a joy to see as well as to hear. Our Alternatives to Traditional Notation and Instruction We have developed three keyboard notation versions that make learning to play the piano or other keyboard instruments easier and less stressful than learning with traditional notation. HOWEVER, this does NOT imply that we are trying to replace traditional notation. Traditional notation is the GOLD STANDARD of notations. We want all keyboard players to learn to read and play from traditional notation. Our intent is that all of our students eventually learn to read and play from this notation. In fact, our learning materials conclude with instruction on how to read traditional notation. Each level of notation and instruction prepares for the next level - and all are preparatory to playing and reading from traditional notation. They enable students to learn to PLAY the keyboard before needing to learn to read traditional notation. They are alternatives to learning to PLAY the keyboard at-the-same-time that one is learning to READ traditional notation, which is very, very hard to do. For examples of our notational versions, click on the link to Unit MIW-10 at the bottom of the Home page on our website (musiciw.com) Navigating Our Website at musiciw.com. Because of the huge volume of material on this site, be sure to make use of the navigation bar (across the top of each page) especially the Directory! |