Teach Yourself to Play Piano Reviewer's Comments

Alfred's Teach Yourself to Play Piano CD ROM is based on the best selling book. This deluxe edition comes with a music dictionary and a booklet that contains all of the songs found inside the program.

The program is easy-to-use, offers video and audio instruction and offers good customer support, despite these positive attributes it fails to reach higher because it does not offer recording, mixing or composition options and cannot track your progress.

Ease of Use:  

Teach Yourself to Play Piano is simple in design and use. There is a navigation window on the left hand side of the screen that runs vertically and through this window you can access and scroll through all of the features and pages included in the program.

You must always have the CD in the drive in order to run this program, which is a hassle.

Feature Set:  

Teach Yourself to Play Piano presents video instruction from a professional pianist, but includes little written material. Unfortunately, the professional player does not perform entire songs, like other programs, but just teaches specific topics.

Teach Yourself to play Piano does not have a searchable song library and it cannot track multiple users or keep history reports.

Ease of Installation:  

We had no problem installing this program.

Lesson Coverage:  

Teach Yourself to Play Piano covers the majority of the lesson topics that we have listed. Each video lesson presents material in each in an easy to comprehend manner. However, the lessons are brief and not in-depth.

Practice Options:  

Teach Yourself to Play Piano includes an ear training program as well as a few games. The ear training program plays a note or notes and teaches you to identify properly the pitch. You have the option of identifying singular notes, tackling multiple notes in succession or identifying intervals.

Teach Yourself to Play Piano does not offer instruction or practices for each hand individually and does not have an animated keyboard.

Help/Support:  

Teach Yourself to Play Piano offers phone and email support. A manual / troubleshooting guide is accessible from the navigation window, and a FAQ section is located on the products homepage.

Summary:  

A good reason for purchasing Teach Yourself to Play Piano is to acquire the Essential Dictionary of Music. It proved to be an excellent reference tool and supported our piano studies. The dictionary contains definitions, biographical information on composers, music theory charts, and instrument and vocal ranges. All other aspects of this software are outshined by the competition.