Audiobus: Use your music apps together.
What is Audiobus? — Audiobus is an award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you use your other music apps together. Chain effects on your favourite synth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app like GarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface output for each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive a synth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDI keyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear. And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.
Download on the App StoreAudiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.
App suggestions for learning piano?
Hey folks, I just bought a piano and I'm excited to learn how to play it. I've been playing since I was kid but it's all been by ear and from memorization. I'm looking for some iPad apps that I can use to learn how to play. I've seen some apps where it's like a Guitar Hero style interface where the notes come down slowly and you play them when they hit the bottom. Is there something like that for iOS? I'm also open to other apps that would help me learn. Thanks guys!
Comments
Learning by ear beats any other way of doing it.
Yeah, I find that a lot easier than trying to learn how to read music. However I think with the magic and creativity of of iPad apps there might be some tool that could help me on my journey to become the drunk uncle that impresses people at family gatherings
Yousician is not bad, it gives you a limited amount of time per day with the free version which I found motivated me to use it. If you happen to have midi on the piano then Synthesia with the midi file import IAP will let you learn songs that you enjoy!
Go to Udemy.com and buy the 30 hr “Piano For All” course for only $10.. Or “The Piano Handbook” by Carl Humphroes which is a book, not an app.
The trick for this is to learn just one iconic song really well that you can casually play on random occasions and walk away, leaving people thinking you can probably play hundreds of other songs as well.
It's great to be a literate musician, and all musicians should learn it. But learning to sight-read music on piano is not the same as being able to play piano. I encourage students to learn tunes by ear before they consult the sheet music:
https://www.amazon.com/Primacy-Ear-Ran-Blake/dp/0557609127
It really depends on what kind of music you want to play. For classical music you would have to learn to read music, both treble and bass clef. This is not as hard as it sounds. Remember Every Good Boy Does Fine? E-G-B-D-F ... The notes on the lines of the treble clef ( right hand). F-A-C-E for the spaces. For the bass clef shift everything up by a line or space. Lines: Good Boys Do Fine Always G-B-D-F-A..... Spaces: ACEG.... Never heard a mnemonic for that one.
Forgive me if you know all this, but many of the fine music makers on this forum admit they don't read music... One joked about the "tadpoles on telegraph lines". But sight reading is really not hard at all, especially compared to what these musicians have learned and apply to their music synthesis!
If you want to play any other kind of western music you will discover it is pretty much a knowledge of melody lines and the chords that go with them. You can get away with just being able to read the treble clef and "fake" the left hand chords. Chords are groups of tones made up of different combinations of notes on the major or minor scales (for the most part), the most famous being C major or C-E-G, which are the 1st, 3rd, and 5th notes of the C major scale, as in C d E f G a b C. Any major chord is the 1st, 3rd and 5th of its corresponding major scale. F major, F-A-C, G major G-B-D, etc. To make a minor chord just flat the third... C-Eflat-G, F-Aflat-C, etc. some say you only need to know three or four chords and you can play almost any popular or rock song. But try playing C-E-G-B ( C major 7) and then C-E-G-B flat (C dominant 7) and you will see how beautiful or powerful chords can be and how they change dimensionally in feeling with the smallest movement of your hand.
Rhythm has its place, too. Most western music is either 4 beats per measure or 3 beats per measure. Divide each 1/4 beat in pieces and you have 1/8 1/16 1/32 notes and don't Forget triplets... 3 notes played in the time of 2 (hmmm). There are dots after notes which tells you to hold it half as long again and rests which tell you to shut up for different intervals of beats.
Now add to that some common sense aspects of breathing and how to strike the notes in a non-tiring way and you probably can play Happy Birthday or any other pop or rock song pretty easily. Note that the famous "standards" you may have heard of, popular music written between 1920 and 1950 approx. we're often very complex compositions with great harmonic subtlety and can be quite a bit harder to play. We seem to have lost that in most (but certainly not all) of today's popular music, which can nonetheless be very powerful and affecting because of player or vocal virtuosity and sophisticated production techniques.
So there is your first lesson and not a word about playing by ear!
Playing by ear is the greatest... So long as you have a great ear!
Frankly, IMO, nothing replaces a good human teacher, emphasis on GOOD. A bad teacher (many teach just to supplement playing earnings) is really BAD! I know it's much more costly but a GOOD teacher will help create good playing habits and ultimately get you playing faster. And, of course, a GOOD teacher will give you some of his or her playing energy as well as affirm and encourage your efforts. You can always try to negotiate the fee or take a lesson every two weeks. And maybe just a few months with an excellent teacher will get you going at a higher level than you might achieve with an iOS app.
Forums and tutorials are great but I would give my eye teeth (what are those, anyway? I might not even have them anymore) for a live person sitting next to me showing me the ropes of iOS music production. But since I live in Istanbul they are fewer than hens' teeth! So if there is a great teacher around, just go for it. I always give the first lesson free to see if we are a good match. You might try asking for that or at least an interview where the teacher describes his or her teaching style and aims.
Sorry if I have said the obvious, but it wasn't obvious to me when I began!
You don't need a great ear to take down the melody and chords for pop songs. That's just basic musicianship.
All cows eat grass
No, but you do have to know chord structure and how to write out a melody line. That is as basic as it gets. It sounds like you teach piano, Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr (I guess JR is the first). Me too, for fifty plus years. We both agree: a good ear is very helpful and basic musicianship is necessary. I, myself, have a lousy ear but I've played at the Blue Note and Birdland in NYC and done five cds on New artists Records label ( founded by Max Roach and Connie Crothers) I'm far from a genius player, but my external musical ear didn't hold me back. ( though I sure wish I had one!). Had to rely on the internal to follow my path. In my case it helped me find the original player inside me. Something I encourage my students to do as well.
What I wanted to say most to illadin was that he shouldn't overlook the advantage of having a teacher rather than, or in addition to a learning app. As a teacher would you encourage illadin to go the human interaction route, or is it better, for reasons you can elucidate, for illadin to follow the go it alone app approach? It seems he has bought an actual acoustic piano and wants to learn to play at a level higher than he is currently at. Would he progress faster and with a better "feel" for playing if he studied with someone such as yourself, or would an app be preferable?
If you look for a fun app there is Simply Piano, there's a subscription cost but I found it really nice and entertaining (you get scored at the end of each song so you can see the progress). I think it teaches only accompagnement but I may be wrong.
Hope it helps!
I agree with everything you wrote in both of your posts, except for one minor point. Certainly a teacher is far preferable to an app, and will speed the learning process along. The only thing I disagree with is that ear learning requires uncommon ability. Nor does it require literacy or knowledge of harmony, although I strongly encourage students to acquire those things. But ear learning should always come first.
The first thing you try to learn by ear is like torture, very slow going and seemingly impossible. I remember that feeling. But it gets easier pretty quickly. Ultimately, you grow faster as a musician by placing the ear first, and the eye second. I know this because I am lazy and was always looking for shortcuts in books (because we didn't have apps back then) that I could read through. When I finally got some discipline and began learning by ear, my rate of growth went way up, and I realized that there are no shortcuts.
Well said. Ear training was torture for me. I guess I got my musical ear from singing along with Billie Holliday, Lester Young, Charlie Christian and Charlie Parker records. Those greats gave me the feel for jazz before I had developed any true jazz feeling myself. They, in a sense, brought me up to their level so I could learn from giants. It was part of my teacher's teaching system which she learned from her teacher. And her system did include training the ear, but, like I said, I was miserable at it!
So maybe illadin will consider a teacher and bring his good ear to the table. I hope you do, illadin!
The current version of Garageband (desktop) has a good series of instructional videos.
Guys, thanks for all of the input. I wasn't expecting any music teachers to chime in so that's a great perspective. I do understand the benefit of having a human teacher helping me along. This is definitely something that I will look in to. There is a music school near my house that offers adult classes. I've taken singing and songwriting classes there so I anticipate a piano class will be the next one I take. Thank you for all of the app suggestions as well, I will look into those. Synthesia looks exactly like what I was describing in the original post and it looks like it's free to try so I will give that one a go. A lot of good advice overall in this thread. Thanks again everyone!
That sounds great, illadin. What kind of music are you interested in? And let us know about your progress!
well, lots of note training and sight reading stuff out there, but I would say also look at IReal Pro, theres just a lot of chords and exercises and chord charts you can download too.
Check out Synthesia by Synthesia LLC.
https://www.amazon.com/How-Play-Piano-James-Rhodes/dp/1786486423/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1526597134&sr=8-1&keywords=james+rhodes+how+to+play+the+piano
For me, a good way to learn an instrument is to play together with other musicians,
Because I don’t have always other musicians around me special when I want to practice, I often use the app iRealPro.
It’s like a band in a box with different styles of music. When I want to practice Guitar iReal Pro will play the drums, Bass and the pianos for me. Any instrument can switched on or off while playing. I like it a lot.
And there are a lot of good music styles you can find in the app. And all free for download.
This app helps me a lot learning new instruments.
There are a few App suggestions here:
https://www.lifewire.com/use-ipad-to-learn-piano-4142902
Hi. I'm on the same boat, so...
I've found that most of the apps that promise to you learning to play are apps based ob suscription, which is not bad, because taht force to you practising. Yosician, Flowkey, and so on.
I've found as well taht my humble intel i3 is useless to worg with a keyboard as midi controller and I've realised how good is my humble Yamaha PSR connected to my old iPad for playing almost every app.
And finally, I've found how many people are making great YT channels and tutorials for playing at any level.
In my case, I've started buying some books for theory and so (the Dummies series, for example), and I could recommend this (cheap) app, that combined with the free desktop software is a great toll (IMHO). The app is a bit limited, but just check it out.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/musescore-songbook-sheet-music/id835731296?mt=8
Spanish link (desktop version).
https://musescore.org/es
Good luck.
http://pianobreaks.com
In literally a few days I went from knowing nothing on piano to sounding like I knew how to play really nice jazz piano, starting by using only the white keys which made things very simple.
Granted, I’m a proficient guitar player of 30 years and have a good ear for music, but I progressed WAY faster than I ever expected using the methods at the above link. The best part is that you can get there quickly using the free lessons, but if you’re like me you’ll be so impressed with his methods and your own progress you’ll happily pay to continue on. Very casual, simple,effective instruction. Good luck!
Thanks for the tip.
Buy “The Piano Handbook” by Carl Humphries as well as the companion “The Piano Workbook “ by the same author to be used concurrently . Why? Because it’s the best text ever and every example is recorded on the accompanying cd . Also “Piano For All” on the Idemy website . Very cheap and thorough video course
I recommend (as I started learning read music and play rightly the piano few months ago) Midilicious as chord revealing tool and Chords as scale/chord building. The first is free the second cheap.
I also bought some Simply Music tutorials and also I attend a class each week. My teacher is amazing but this needs practice in both sides (reading and playing). Putting an focus (learn this for the end of the summer) or playing with others helps a bit with lazy.
IReal pro is also a good app with infinite music sheets to learn and play along.
Take your time and find your path. My teacher is not so learn by ear than loo at keys (and scales) but I have good ear and I understand a lot of things mixing from here and there which in the end makes me happy due I see progression (even I still fail most of the time or go slow with basic things). My brains works differently and my main instrument at the moment is keytar (so more near to accordion than true keyboard). It’s a process...
...and crows eat grains
This thread is 6 months old. I really need to read the original date on a thread before getting excited by the question from an OP that could give a phuck.
I have the correct answer that will teach anyone to play in 4 weeks. Sad. I missed the opportunity to share it. It's based on the lost diaries of Mendel Slimovitz who is regarded as the best pianist of the 15th century. A forgotten genius.
(I should be wrapping portions of this in SH:-IT tags.)
I like this Playground Sessions app with limitation. its just ok to learn I Don't able to choose is that good or bad but I read an article on about this https://rhythmistic.com/playground-sessions-the-best-piano-learning-app/ . Give me suggestion is they are right or wrong
Have you tried an online piano course, there are some good beginner-friendly ones like PianoforAll https://musicgny.com/piano-for-all-review/