Today I'm going to be covering my initial impressions of the Piano For All program. It's sort of my first couple days with using it and I bought the program for thirty-nine dollars which was fifty percent off its original price. it still is fifty percent off last time I checked but I don't know how long that's going to last. I thought $39 is really good especially compared to some of the other programs that I checked out which was playground sessions and piano marvel which are subscription-based services. I don't have a lot of money I decided to opt for the cheaper one piano / law and after I purchased it I got a download link where I downloaded a one-and-a-half gigabyte file so it was pretty hefty and it was just a bunch of pdfs with embedded video and I set up my surface pro just on my music stand. then I just go through the lessons one by one until I master it and then I move on and from what I've gathered so far the curriculum itself seems to be pretty well laid out it starts off getting to know the notes of the keyboard which is great for a beginner. I already knew the note names going into it so I didn't really need to go through that I skim through it but I didn't go into much great detail with that next it covered chords which I think is really the strength of this program a lot of traditional methods especially when I was learning guitar was to first teach melodies that you've learned simple things such as I mean that's great no it's good for getting a good foundation but the problem is his abilities aren't very transferable whereas chords are transferable among songs if you see a c chord and a song then you look at another song as a c chord is going to be the same thing it might be played differently on the keyboard but the same general structure is the same so that aspect of the program I like a lot because you're able to apply what you learn to songs that you want to learn later on down the road the other thing that was very beneficial about the programs that it taught finger position which is something that I never learned before when I was first learning chords and things I would just do whatever was comfortable for me but that didn't necessarily translate into being the correct method so whatever the correct positioning and I will say it was tough for me to get a handle on it at first my hand was not comfortable in the position that the program wanted my hand to be in but after about about five days or so the soreness one away and I can't say that it's a hundred percent comfortable right now but it's definitely I don't really notice it anymore but the instruction itself is very clear the instructor robin whole got this killer british accent and he has these pdfs with embedded video and audio so you watch a video for each of the lessons and it goes through him at the keyboard and then has an animated keyboard at the top with the keys that are lit up beggars supposed to press so it's really good for visual learners the audio files are really helpful because you learn a lot of songs very quickly at least the chords of the songs and the audio allows you to hear how it's supposed to sound so that you don't have to go back to the video and try to find where it was in that video so that just adds a level of convenience to it there are a couple things that could be improved upon maybe for some people it doesn't have some advanced features like there's some programs that have midi input so you would take your keyboard plug it into your computer and you would play along and then it would tell you what notes you got wrong and trouble spots that you need to work on this doesn't have that it's just pdfs and videos but I mean if if you have ears I could hear I mean you can tell where your trouble spots are if you play a chord and something sounds bad I mean that's a clear sign that that's something that you need to work on so I personally think the midi input thing of other programs is a little gimmicky but you know I could see that being an obstacle for some people for this program so I just wanted to point that out there another thing that I thought was a little interesting was that the instructor doesn't really go into a lot of detail about what to do with the left hand when you're learning chords so he teaches you how to form the chords in your right hand and what figures to use but for the left hand it's left kind of open to interpretation really you can watch the videos and you can see what fingers he uses but he doesn't explicitly tell you which ones to use and maybe that's intentional or maybe that's something that's covered later on but just something that I thought maybe could be improved upon this course was ever realized but overall I'm really pleased with the program it especially for $39 I I think it's a seal there's like a 60-day money-back guarantee I don't know how easy it is to return software like this but I I'm not going to need to return it so I wouldn't know but over the next video what I'm going to do is cover weeks 1 through 3 because I have owned this for three weeks I just wanted to do my initial impressions of it first.
Now I will cover weeks 1 through 3 of the course there's a going to be a decent amount of material to cover so it probably will be a little bit of a longer post but again if you have suggestions for things that I can add to my reviews later on I love the hear them.
In couple of month I progressed with the piano for all program and as well I've just progressed in the piano in general so when I was going to the piano for all program the past few months the because it has been months since the last time I've uploaded the main thing that I've been working on is the blues and jazz book and it goes over really well the elements of blues and the fundamentals of jazz and one of the first thing that it teaches you is the blues scale which is a really good thing to know if you want to do improvisation so blues scale just sounds a little something like this so use that and you can improve over chord progressions to start learning how to become more artful in your improvisation and one of the other things that it teaches you is chord progressions that you can use and so that you can start to improvise so one of the ones that they teach use as follows so you can probably tell that it has that seventh chord flavor to it which makes it a little jazzy a little bluesy and I really like the way that it sounds and the other thing that's interesting about is that has that sort of that bounce sound to it so again it just adds to that blues character the program also teaches you riffs that you can do and your right hand while you're playing the chord progression with your left hand so to take an example of that if I do the chord progression I was just doing before I can add it in my left hand so that just gives you an idea of some of the improvement ideas you can do a little sloppy but you know you can get the idea at least it's it's I think that blues and jazz is something that probably takes years to master so it's not something that I'm trying to just rush to the finish line and be able to do I know that it's a evolution of being able to do it over time so as far as the rest of the book goes it basically just goes over different chord progressions that you can do with the blue scale one of the things is that because jazz is one of my favorite types of music I want it to spend a lot of time with this book so that I can fully appreciate what it has to offer because it has a lot of content in it so I don't really have much more to say through the book because it just goes through more of those risks and chord progressions and how you can use those to help with your improvisation but one of the other things that I want to go over with you is a couple songs that I've learned over the past couple months because as much as I like going through the piano for all program it doesn't teach a lot of like pop songs and things of that nature so I wanted to do some of those so that I could impress my friends so the first one that I decided to learn was sara bareilles love song feel like most people know this iconic riff so let me play it for you you and unfortunately those are the only parts I learned so sorry to keep you in suspense I know the chorus was right there but I really like this song it has a nice bouncy pop feel to it and I'll learn the rest later but I want to really wanted to upload something so that you all could see the progress that I've made and the other song that I learned I wanted to bring it back a little old school in the 80s at least and I decide to learn bruce hornsby the way it is and this is by far the most challenging song that I've learned to play it's really at my upper threshold what I can play and not have it sound awful so I'll play a few snippets of that and well we'll see how it goes it it's really hit or miss sometimes boo so that song is really hard I'm sure you could hear quite a few mistakes there I did but this this has taken me weeks just to be able to get on this level so I'm pretty proud of where I am with it now I'm going to keep working at it to get better at it and I'm also going to keep working through the piano for all program I'm going to try to upload another post sooner than I did with this one because I think the last time I made something was in february or march so hopefully I'll be able to practice this a little more regularly and be able to progress a little quicker as far as to their program so I can give you a better taste of what it has to offer but I still really recommend it as far as being able to figure out blues jazz and just learning the piano in general so as always I have a link below for the piano for all program so please check it out and I'll see you next time.
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