Thursday, September 11, 2008

Piano Wizard Affiliate Program

Affiliate Programs are a great way to make money online. It's usually best to partner with merchants that offer products that would be of interest to your customers. We're excited about a product called Piano Wizard. This amazing software can teach virtually anyone how to play piano. (don't worry, it comes with a keyboard if you need one). But it's also an opportunity for webmasters to profit along with the company through their affiliate program, explained at www.musicwizardaffiliates.com.

Teaching Piano the Way a Child Learns

Traditional piano lessons teach musical notation first. But most children don't want to wade through the hieroglyphics before they get to play. They want to play NOW. The Piano Wizard Method teaches anyone to easily play piano.

With Piano Wizard, your child is playing the piano the instant the game is started. They learn intuitively to hit the right note at the right time. Gradually, as their skill level advances, so does the game. Before you know it, your child has learned to read music.


Step 1, play the game, Piano Wizard Step 2, Rotate the Game, Piano Wizard Step 4, Read Real Music, Piano Wizard

Now you can share the great news about this ground-breaking teaching game and make some money too.

For complete information on the Piano Wizard Affiliate Program, please visit www.musicwizardaffiliates.com

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Learning to Play an Instrument? Try MIDI Files

MIDI files have been floating around the Internet for over 20 years. We've all heard them while surfing at one time or another, even if we didn't realize it. Many musicians, pro and amateur , use MIDI files as backing tracks . Video games oftentimes use MIDI technology to render music. But the educational aspect of a MIDI file is often overlooked.

Studies have shown that when learning to play an instrument (such as guitar or piano) you can get faster results by playing along with accompaniment. It,s certainly more fun than playing alone - and fun is a factor when learning to play. However, the educational factor goes beyond fun alone.

Playing with others helps develop good timing. It helps with ear training improvement as you listen to the parts someone else is playing. It helps develop a musical discipline that is lacking when you play alone. But what if no one else is around? Well, thanks to MIDI files, you are never alone. You can have a full-blown band at your disposal at any time!

You don't need any special equipment to play MIDI files - all computers are capable of playing them. By doing a Google search, you can find thousands of MIDI files. The downside is that the general quality of many freely available Midis aren't that good, but that is not the point. When I was learning to play guitar, I got together with a few friends and we started a garage band. Our average age was about 13 years old. We weren't very good at first, but we got better and five years later turned professional. The experience over the years was like a musical training camp.

After you find your MIDI files, start playing along with them. Trying to learn the parts is great, but so is improvising along with the song (jamming). Because MIDI files are as accurate as a metronome you will be developing your sense of timing. By repetition you'll be improving your own chops.

Remember, this is just a start. At some point you'll want to play with real people.

Join the school band or look into other group playing programs. Get out there are jam with others whenever you have a chance, no matter how bad it sounds. The Beatles weren't great when they first started, but we've all got to start somewhere. And who knows, someday you might end up being a real guitar hero!

Vincent J. Miele is an accomplished musician and the founder of CYBERMIDI.com, a quality source of pro MIDI files and backing tracks . Article Copyright 2008 V.J Miele.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Music Before Theory - What does it mean?

Music Theory is the field of study that deals with the mechanics of music and how music works. In the simplest context, it's the study of music notation, rhythm, melodic structure, harmony and form.

This being the traditional approach, there are literally thousands of books, lessons,teachers, websites, and other resources out there where you can learn about music theory.


Music Theory is historically embedded with multiple layers of code, added on with each generation or era to deal with the newest complexities and theories of the latest generation. These were no more than working theories about how to organize music, and how we hear music. It is as culturally arbitrary as Arabic scales or Javanese tunings, and at the end of the day, it is OLD theory.


We use the conventions and theory of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven’s students to explain music that has evolved tremendously. Chopin muddied the waters of harmonic theory, and Debussy absolutely negated them, atonal and ethnic music ignored it or never new about it, and yet music has not only survived, it has evolved and exploded in a wonderful hybrid of styles and flavors.


The theory is only useful to a limited extent in “explaining” music, and in fact leads to a great deal of confusion. It is as if we tried to explain modern English grammar and vocabulary (a language salad if ever there was one) with ancient Latin Grammar cases. It sort of works, because we have Latin as one of our roots, but it really confuses too, if you don’t realize it is just an arbitrary model that didn’t even really explain Latin.

Because there is an underlying simplicity and logic to music that one gets to after years of study, where consonance and dissonance are yin and yang, where pattern and deviation are yin and yang, and where pitch and time are yin and yang, and music is the eternal interplay of all of them and more, and all the theory in the world is just, well, not really helpful at getting to the core of music and music making. Especially if all you want to do is play and enjoy music.


MOST musicians cannot read music fluently, that is how bad it is. At best they decipher it. Forget the rest of us (until now). Those that can read, tend to read a melodic instrument, like a flute or clarinet, not a harmonic instrument, like guitar or piano. Melody is sequential, like language. Harmony, and rhythm, are simultaneous, multiple streams of information coming at us at once. THAT is challenging, and what takes years of practice to learn.


Traditional piano lessons teach musical notation first. But most learners don't want to wade through the hieroglyphics before they get to play. They want to play NOW. We've discovered a new method that teaches anyone to easily play piano using the music before theory approach.


This new approach is called the Piano Wizard Learning System. With Piano Wizard you will still need to PRACTICE, but the SECRET to MASTERY is to ENJOY the practice. The Piano Wizard 4 Step method can help you enjoy practice, and take you gradually to the farthest depths and highest mountains of musical notation, in an enjoyable fun journey through the greatest music ever written. A secret treasure chest of musical literature, wide open for you to enjoy for the rest of your life. And probably the most amazing thing about this method is that is a a game - but ideal for any age.


Piano Wizard won’t teach you about theory or to read music, because at the end of the day, fluency is unconscious, automatic association - fluency is where a student starts their studies of language theory.


Think about it. A child of one can understand (passive comprehension) more than they can say. They begin to speak, they get corrected, (or not) and begin to learn the most complex languages in the world reasonably well by the time they are five, with or without guidance or training, just by doing. So, active speaking came second, after comprehension, in the natural learning process that we all have hard-wired into our brains.


Then, we teach them to read, again (passive) then to write (active), and after a year or two more we teach them the parts of speech, and then to diagram sentences, conjugate verbs, undangle prepositions.


Piano Wizard teaches by DOING - by PLAYING. All the underlying logic of music is there, and is subconsciously, and then consciously exposed to the player, but that comprehension is not necessary for them to play, learn and enjoy music. In fact, this game transcends years of musical theory, history, and an archaic confusing musical notation tradition, and reveals in living color the underlying MATHMATICAL and SPATIAL logic of music.


There are 2 basic dimensions, pitch (which note, color coded for easy identification in the game) and rhythm, or time, (revealed by showing the original logic of space between notes to show the correct time to play them). Because the child can ANTICIPATE when to play the note, their innate hand-eye coordination is all they need to play the music of the masters, in seconds.


There are other dimensions of music that the game does NOT teach, like timbre, attack, dynamics, and the rich musical conventions we inherited that constitute harmonic theory, but these are the muscles, the flesh, the organs of music. Pitch and Time are the skeleton, upon which all the rest hangs. Get that right, and you have a basic form, from which you can BEGIN to create great music.


Wanna Play? Click here to learn more about Piano Wizard.


Practicing the Piano Should Be A Positive Experience!

Interesting gaming programs which is also truly educational is not easy to find -- especially in the category of music instruction. Computer software games are a huge and burgeoning industry because kids are almost hopelessly captured by them. Wouldn't the ideal music-learning process integrate piano instruction software with a fun, interactive gaming environment?

Software applications which furnishes users a non-violent choice to mainstream video games, which are simultaneously, compelling, and challenging, could also teach musical literacy quite efficiently. Such a combination would have the unrivaled potential to transform the normally tedious and repetitive piano practice into an exciting, extremely rewarding video game experience – ultimately taking the "yuck!" out of each piano practice -- forever.

Using gaming software to make practicing the piano enjoyable would solve some particularly vexing problems. Fathers and mothers wouldn't feel obliged to nag their kids to practice (they might actually have the opposite problem – they may have to nag their kids to STOP practicing). Piano teachers need not worry whether their students will make any progress between lessons. On the students' side, the shear numbers of people to which learning the piano could be made accessible would be substantially enlarged. And, perhaps first and foremost, piano students will associate fun and attainment with the piano instead of drudgery and struggle.

Music Wizard Group, makers of Piano Wizard, appears to have found that magical fusion. They are enthusiastically dedicated to deliver FUN piano practice software to the marketplace -- thanks to a sound product concept and design environment.

Chris Salter, the genius behind MWG, says, "Piano Wizard represents a significant shift in the way we introduce music to kids as well as adults, with many people thinking that it simply can't be done, or conversely, that they have seen this before. Because of these perceptions, we knew we [had to] let people see for themselves that the gateways to music are now wide open for everyone.”

You should know that Piano Wizard isn't the only piano practice software out there. There are about ten or more titles to choose from including Teach Me Piano, Piano Suite Premier, and Instant Play Piano. Nonetheless, none of these are really video games, but are instructional software focussed on teaching skills – not so much of the keep-them-glued magic of Piano Wizard. Teach Me Piano includes some games as accessories, but they are not a pivotal part of their program. So, in actuality Allegro Rainbow has blazed the trail by melding piano instruction with gaming software.

Jesse Fisher, enjoys writing about interesting new developments in the musical software industry. Visit Music wizard to learn more about this breakthrough in educational programs.