I've had this Piano Wizard premier version for a year and a half now. My son has been practicing the piano 90 minutes a day with it. He is 8 years old, mentally retarded, and for the longest time I've had trouble finding something he could do. He could hardly even understand enough to appreciate toddler TV programs. The Piano Wizard is my son's first project of his life. It is an intuitive piano teaching system. You see the color dot on the screen, you press the corresponded colored key on the musical keyboard. The music's speed can be controlled so much that you can have it coming literally at a snail's speed such that even people with the worst reflexes have the time to find the right key to push.
That's how my son got started with Twinkle Twinkle, pushing one key at a time. There is no need to know how to read music at that point. However, music notation is still taught in the system. My video here shows my son playing the first level of a song, where the eggs go straight up exactly in the order of the layout of a piano's keys. This makes it possible even for him to figure out readily when to push which key. Once he's familiar with that, level two has the eggs going sideways, so it is a little less intuitive. Once my son gets the fingering down in level one, he doesn't have much trouble adjusting to level 2. Level 3 shows normal musical notes but still in the color system to indicate the keys. Then Level 4, which I show my son play here in the second half of the video, has just the normal musical notes. As you can see, my son adjusts to that rather well too.
The Piano Wizard premier version is extremely well designed with convenient features. You can set it so that it repeats any part of the song such that you play the difficult part again and again. You can stop the song anywhere and scroll it back to any other part and start right there. I use those two features all the time. It keeps count of how many keys my son missed and gives a score at the end, so I can just let my son practice while I do housework, then check the score to gauge his performance.
The easy level has 100 songs divided by difficulty into 10 levels. This video shows my son play a song in level 6. These songs have the fingerings already keyed in, which is another help for beginners. One can also input or edit any figuring easily for any song. It is also an easy matter to input ANY midi song into the Piano Wizard. I have downloaded free Disney and Star War songs and watch the notes go up inside the Piano Wizard. Learning to play them, however, is still a lot of work!
I use two keyboards with Piano Wizard: the one that came with the program, and a cheap Yamaha keyboard I bought around 6 years ago. Both keyboards work flawlessly with the Wizard in my XP desktop, but with my XP laptops sometimes the drivers fail, and out of the blue the Piano Wizard loses contact with the keyboard and I have to restart the computer to make things go again. But it is not a big problem for me.
The Piano Wizard with keyboard isn't cheap, but it's a lot cheaper than piano lessons. It is enough to get somebody going in learn to play at least up to medium level. I don't even know how to play the piano myself, and yet, by using the program, I have great fun teaching my son to play and watch him improve. I start him slow and gradually increase the speed until he can play at full speed. Who'd ever imagine that he could do this? And it takes me little time because once I get him going, he just practice until he gets good at it; I only have to supervise on occasion. Once you choose a speed, it will play again at the same speed until you change it, so it is really convenient.
In the end, this is easier than driving him to piano lessons even if you don't count the cost. When my relatives and friends watch my son play, they always exclaim, "Wow, you are doing so good with him!"
During the time my son's been playing the piano, his speech and understanding has also improved greatly. I don't know if the piano playing helped? But there is some evidence that music improves a child's intelligence. It's worth a try.
The Piano Wizard is an ingeniously designed system for somebody who wants to teach himself how to play. If even my son can do it, who can't? ( As long as one possesses basic motor skills and hand eye coordination.)
I highly recommend it to anyone.
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