Teach Me Piano

by Turtle Beach

Product Features

• Learn at your own pace
• Study with a professional teacher who demonstrates piano techniques through videos you watch right on your PC's monitor
• Learn to play more than 75 well-known songs - all with full background accompaniment
• Receive feedback on your performance from the interactive scoring system
• It's like having your own private music teacher

Product Details

Product Manual [2.01mb PDF]

• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000021YTT
• Item model number: VTS-4840-100F
• Date first available at Amazon.com: August 8, 2000
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,732 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #68 in Software > Video & Music > Software > Instruction
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

Voyetra's Teach Me Piano is an excellent choice for the beginning or intermediate piano student. With a slick, intuitive, and highly graphical interface and several dozen musically intelligent piano lessons, this CD-ROM makes it fun and easy to learn music with any MIDI-compatible keyboard or piano. A standout feature here is the highly effective interface, which sports a visual music room with the piano--and uses piano keys themselves to reach major program features. (Younger users should be able to learn to click on the right objects to get going.) The heart of this title features over 60 lessons, including the fundamentals of reading music and solid, beginning piano technique. You'll learn basic fingerings, scales, intervals, and the essentials of music notation. A library of some 75 songs--including traditional and folk tunes, with plenty of short classical pieces in a good range of difficulty--gives you something to practice. The best thing about the instruction has to be the videos that illustrate proper pianistic technique. A piano expert shows you all the correct positions and fingerings in real-time and full-motion video with sound. It's just the sort of thing that can lead to good habits for new players. As you go forward in the lessons here, you'll master playing in musical keys with up to three sharps or flats. The songbook feature breaks out your library of tunes, which you can work on separately outside of the lesson format. You can search for pieces by genre, composer, and level of difficulty.

With its focus on teaching piano from the ground up along with "real" music notation, this CD-ROM title will be a winner with any aspiring music student who's serious about learning the piano. Teach Me Piano has visual polish and plenty of musical expertise to offer anyone, whatever your age. --Rich Dragan

Product Description

Teach Me Piano provides a full course of piano lessons from beginner through intermediate skills System Requirements - Pentium 200MHz or more (Celeron 400MHz or more for Windows 2000 or XP) 32MB of RAM (Windows 98 or Me) / 64MB (Windows 2000 or XP) 13MB of Hard Drive Space Windows 98, Me, 2000 Pro, or XP 800x600 High Color (16-bit) Display 16-bit DirectSound-compatible Soundcard w/ MIDI port 4x CD-ROM Drive

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

53 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Teach Me Piano, December 18, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Teach Me Piano (CD-ROM)

Having just purchased a used piano for my daughter, I decided to attempt to learn it also. At the age of 35, I didn't want to take beginning piano lessons so I purchased the above software, Teach Me Piano. When you consider the average cost of weekly piano lessons, this software really does pay for itself after a few lessons. I found it easy to use, however I would strongly recommend you only buy it if you have your computer relatively close to the piano in question. Laptop which you could sit on the piano would be preferable. The interactive portion of the lesson really requires a good quality microphone. You must be self-motivated to get anything out of this.

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly Recommended Training Software!, April 3, 2001

By 

Minh Doan (Boisbriand, Quebec, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Teach Me Piano (CD-ROM)

I evaluated this software before giving it to a close friend of mine and I must admit Voyetra did a very good job at it.

Learning is done at a very gradual pace. You basically can start from scratch, learning how to read and play with one hand, the go on to two. This is done in three effective steps.

First, you learn the rhythm of the song or tune you want to play for the left hand. You just basically press any key with the left hand on the keyboard and master the rhythm. You do not need to play the tune. You just follow the metronome. You then switch to the right hand and redo the process again. Finally, you do it with two hands. At this stage, you do not learn the pitch, just the rhythm.

Second, you learn to play the tune (or pitch) of the left hand, but without bothering with the rhythm. This is done at your own pace. You just learn the notes. You then repeat this for the right hand, then both hands.

Third and last, once you have gone through the two previous steps, you now play the tune, again for the left hand only, this time following the rhythm. Then you continue on with the right. Then finally you are ready with two hands.

Basically, this gives a lesson of three steps (rhythm, pitch, rhythm + pitch), each done in three parts (left hand, right hand, both hands).

You can skip or repeat any of these steps as much as you want. You can also ask the software to do a demonstration for you of a particular step. The evaluation only takes into account your performance in the final step with both hands, and even here you can repeat the evaluation as much as you like (until you get a score of 100% every time; this is when you should stop bragging and go on!).

The software can be adjusted in its tolerance with three levels of accuracy (beginners, intermediate, advance).

All this is possible ONLY if you have a keyboard connected to your computer (no, there is none included with the software). Should you want to do it with an ordinary piano, be aware that this software does NOT use a microphone. Therefore, it is impossible for this software to evaluate your performance in this case. But it can still assist you (in a limited way).

Interlaced with the lessons are video clips of your instructor, Hugh Berberich. He is actually quite efficient and very friendly, and narrates the lesson quite well.

There is even a profile manager that allows different people to learn at their own pace. (WARNING! There is actually a small error in this feature, but please go to the technical support database at Voyetra's website, under "Power tips: multiple students", for more details.)

This software comes highly recommended to anyone who wants to start learning to those at an intermediate level of learning.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Beware Teach Me Piano will not run on XP, December 26, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Teach Me Piano (CD-ROM)

Beware... I bought a new PC with XP and then "Teach Me Piano." Only to find out that "Teach Me Piano" will not install on XP, even though voyetra shows XP support......