Hm. One of the things that I promised myself that I would do, is to distill the songs I wanted to learn down to a "Nashville numbering system," i.e., I-vi-ii-V7, etc. I felt that if I perceived a pattern, it would be easier to remember that, instead of reading ahead one chord at a time.

In reality what I find is that I end up memorizing hand movements. In other words, I end up learning when I need to move my left hand to a new position; how far, and what fingers to put down, etc. I believe this is called "Muscle Memory."

Perhaps another topic, but I've often wondered whether it might be possible to actually write "music instructions" in this way- visual cues to the player's hand and finger movements specific to an AUTO-CHORD, as opposed to dots that atomically represent pitches. I've added annotations to my printed music along these lines. It's a laborious process that discourages me from learning new songs, but I can hardly play a tempo without such annotations.

What I'm saying is: showing all the dots makes eminent sense for PIANO. But as soon as you think about something like an accordion, chord organ, or arranger with "intelligent" multi-note chords, at least some of the dots in the bass clef amount to extraneous information that has to be processed and selectively ignored for real time play.

I'm not a professional musician, and I'll probably NEVER invest the study time needed to recognize multi-note chord and left hand patterns on sight. But what would happen if we dismiss the pre-existing conventions of the grand staff, and invented an ANIMATED music notation for the 21st Century. A couple of metaphors might be "follow the bouncing ball," or "come at me, bro!" (Think of Guitar Hero.) With video display tablets like the iPad, digital reproduction of musical works for distribution, etc., for the first time we can tailor the display of music (or fingering instructions) to how the human brain works best!!

Maybe we need to invent an Xbox game called "Chord Hero!" Let's make arrangers fun again! ;-)