Description:
Magix Piano and Keyboard Workshop offers an appealing piano-practice tool designed for any beginning or intermediate musician with a MIDI keyboard or piano. With several features to improve your sight-reading abilities, this package is ideal for the younger user, but should be useful to adult players as well. There are some 30 songs to practice in Piano and Keyboard Workshop. (More are available from Magix's Web site.) The selection of tunes centers on simple melodies such as "Alouette" and "Amazing Grace" to snippets of recognizable music from Bach, Beethoven, and Scott Joplin. In Teach mode, the program displays a keyboard indicating the correct keys to play. When you play on your MIDI-enabled keyboard, the Workshop synchs up your notes with the onscreen display. We liked being able to hide each staff so you could work on right-hand and left-hand parts separately, and the "loop" music was a pleasant way to get in some effective practice. Definitely the most fun we had here is with the Backing mode in which you play a simple melody and hear a small electronic orchestra behind you. In this mode, your piano tracks are backed up by additional MIDI voices. (If you have any decent sound card or keyboard, you'll sound quite impressive, even just playing a single line of melody.) This feature should provide plenty of positive reinforcement to young musical ears, to help them keep practicing. Another feature that will please younger users is the Game mode, which tests your ability to read music against several electronic musical "judges," with varying levels of difficulty. Here, swatches of music appear onscreen, and it's up to you to play the correct notes and/or rhythm. Electronic judges include Mr. Easy and Ms. Strict (well, admittedly not the most inventive of names). But with the most difficult, Mr. Guru, the game proved very challenging, with notably difficult dotted rhythms and plenty of 32nd notes that will test the sight-reading abilities of any piano student. Overall, Piano and Keyboard Workshop offers an inexpensive, yet useful, tool for practicing music with any MIDI-compatible keyboard. You'll probably want to use this program alongside traditional--or electronic lessons--for additional background musical material, but there's little doubt this tool can hone your basic piano skills. --Rich Dragan
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