Music: Flashlight Piano

To become a concert pianist one must thump piano keys five hours a day for at least ten years. To become even a fair-to-middling amateur requires a great deal of patient practice. Inventive minds have long sought painless substitutes for the drudgery involved in learning how to play the piano. Short-cut systems and gadgets of recent years have included Lee Roberts' (Smiles) sliding rule, on which colored dots indicate what notes to play in a given situation; charts distributed by NBC on which chords are indicated by numbers.

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