Description:
Voyetra's Teach Me Piano is an excellent choice for the beginning or intermediate piano student. With a slick, intuitive, and highly graphical interface and several dozen musically intelligent piano lessons, this CD-ROM makes it fun and easy to learn music with any MIDI-compatible keyboard or piano. A standout feature here is the highly effective interface, which sports a visual music room with the piano--and uses piano keys themselves to reach major program features. (Younger users should be able to learn to click on the right objects to get going.) The heart of this title features over 60 lessons, including the fundamentals of reading music and solid, beginning piano technique. You'll learn basic fingerings, scales, intervals, and the essentials of music notation. A library of some 75 songs--including traditional and folk tunes, with plenty of short classical pieces in a good range of difficulty--gives you something to practice. The best thing about the instruction has to be the videos that illustrate proper pianistic technique. A piano expert shows you all the correct positions and fingerings in real-time and full-motion video with sound. It's just the sort of thing that can lead to good habits for new players. As you go forward in the lessons here, you'll master playing in musical keys with up to three sharps or flats. The songbook feature breaks out your library of tunes, which you can work on separately outside of the lesson format. You can search for pieces by genre, composer, and level of difficulty. With its focus on teaching piano from the ground up along with "real" music notation, this CD-ROM title will be a winner with any aspiring music student who's serious about learning the piano. Teach Me Piano has visual polish and plenty of musical expertise to offer anyone, whatever your age. --Rich Dragan
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