About this app
Are you a piano lover and would like to learn to play it by yourself? Have you ever tried to teach yourself piano with a self-study method (learn from a book, a website,...), but without success, because you find it difficult to understand music theory, and you have no idea whether the way you're playing a piece of music is correct or not, as no piano tutor is there to help you?"Piano eTutor" app introduces a totally new approach to piano learning which is completely technology-oriented. The common problems with learning piano have been solved in an intuitive and user-friendly way, thanks to the technologies that the app has tried to make the most of. You don't need to read a lot of theory to start playing. Just read a few lines of summary and interact immediately with the exercises, then you'll easily get what you want to know. With the help of technology, not much explanation is required in order to demonstrate a musical concept.
The app is specially designed to work with a digital piano, thanks to the ability to connect and interact between a mobile device and the piano (via MIDI cable or Bluetooth). You can still use the app with an acoustic piano, but some of the features won't be supported.
Compared to other traditional self-study methods, the app provides you with two things that other methods don't have, which are INTERACTION and MUSICAL TOOLS.
* INTERACTION:
- Once connected to a digital piano, the app can respond to what you play on the piano: it checks whether the notes you're playing are correct or not, in terms of pitch and timing, then shows you the next notes to play. In this way, you can learn to play note by note, one hand at a time, then combine two hands to play the whole song at the right speed.
* MUSICAL TOOLS:
- Playback tool: You can listen to an exercise before practice, to analyze the structure, rhythm, note positions, ...
- Tempo-adjustment tool: You can adjust the tempo (speed) of the exercise to the value that you feel comfortable with. This helps you start practicing at a slow speed, then gradually increase the playing speed.
- Metronome tool: This tool helps you understand and develop the sense of beats, the rhythmic aspect of music. In addition, it also helps you play in the correct timing, which is an extremely important skill in music.
- Part-selection tool: In an exercise, there can be easy parts as well as difficult ones. You can just select the parts that you think you need to work on to start practicing.
- Note-hint tool: If you find it difficult to identify the position of a note, or the note positions of a chord, you can choose to show hints when practicing, then the app will show you where the notes are located on the keyboard.
In addition, there're TWO EXCLUSIVE FEATURES that you won't find in most other piano learning apps. Piano eTutor is built upon the sheet music processing technology that we've been developing for many years, so it can provide advanced features related to sheet music. Specifically, two very useful features:
- Import your own sheet music: if you want to learn a specific song, you can look for it on a digital sheet music sharing website, then download the song (in MusicXML or MIDI format) and import it into the app.
- Transpose songs to any key: If the song you're learning is in a difficult key (e.g., the key with four sharps), you can just transpose it into an easier key to learn. Or when learning piano accompaniment, it's useful to transpose a song into a key that suits your vocal range.
* The app doesn't teach you only piano solo, but it also teaches you piano accompaniment.
