UNITED KINGOM - Imagine a small piece of software that – when inserted into your computer – can offer an array of some 500 tunes to learn, music and theory instruction, games to make theory learning more fun, a personal ‘instructor’ who evaluates your piano playing, 300 or so composer biographies and enables you to write your own music and hear it played back.
This attractive package – The Piano Suite Teaching System Software, created by a Canadian developer – contains all of the above and is designed to teach users to play the piano as well as to provide a solid grounding in theory, history and composition.
It does take some time and patience to set up the system (mine came with a sleek 49-key MIDI keyboard of pleasing sound and an easy touch) but the hard work is worth the wait.
My favorite sections of the Piano Suite were the Composer’s Corner and Personal Profile. With Composer’s Corner, you can write music and hear it played back (by yourself!) and if you like it, you can print it off as sheet music. Personal Profile keeps tabs on your learning process and gives you detailed reports on your progress. This is great fun, though I’d hasten to suggest that this should not be used instead of piano lessons, but rather to complement them and make the learning process back at home a little more fun.
I was amazed to discover the vast list of pieces to learn (around 500), which covers the genres Classical, Pop, Anthems, Folk, Jazz, Christmas, Religious and more. There are five skill levels, from beginner to intermediate, and each piece is wonderfully illustrated to tempt the user to work on it. As you practise, you get a full feedback report on how you played.
Piano Suite is really designed for the pianist or keyboard player that’s starting out, no matter what age. I’ve been told that this Premier Edition retails at £79.95, which, for all of its learning tools, games and tunes, seems a pretty reasonable price.
- Marius Dawn.
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