Piano For All

Piano For All is a successful and practical piano course aimed at beginners. It has a huge amount of stuff in 10 ebooks for the very low price of $39.95.

The basis of Robin Hall's Piano For All is "rhythm style piano" - or "party piano" - teaching how to play accompaniment to songs with chords, and the student will enjoy the immediate satisfaction of being able to play something that works.

The rhythm style piano is exemplified by that of The Beatles, Elton John, Billy Joel, Coldplay, and many others, with the piano playing chords in the "pulse" of the song. But rhythm style piano can also be 50's rock like Elvis Presley's Jailhouse Rock, or the famous Fats Domino version of Blueberry Hill.

This is a sample page from Piano For All - you can hear the examples by clicking the speaker icons and watch an instructional video by clicking the film icon.

All of the 10 parts of Piano For All are in pdf format with audio and video clips embedded in the page. You have to be online to hear and see them, though - they are not downloaded to your hard drive.

With Piano For All you will learn all of the piano rhythms suitable for popular music, and after the foundation is laid down from books 1-4, the piano course goes into more advanced playing styles, ballads, jazz and advanced blues. Book 8 is about taming the classics, learning to read sheet music and practicing classical pieces.

You'll get to book 9 before you are introduced to practicing scales! And although that's basic stuff to become a really skilled pianist, I think it's clever to put it this far in the course. Most Piano For All students will probably not get this far anyway, but stay content with the party stuff. And they will get full value for their money at that!

Piano For All's 10 ebooks includes a huge repertoire, and no. 10 is a resource book with song suggestions (and which rhythm to play), reviews, list of piano websites etc.

All of the content in Piano For All is minutely described on its website.
Watch the trailer at the top of this post to get an idea of the diversity of this piano course!

If you would rather have the piano course on CD ROM, you have that option for only $49.95, delivered anywhere in the world. And, as mentioned, the price for the download is only $39.95.

Click Here! 

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Playing Through The Blues

Griff Hamlin

I have a preference for guitar courses with a confined and targeted content.
And that's what you have with Griff Hamlin's Playing Through The Blues - a guide for the lead guitar player.

It covers all of the components used by great blues guitarists like B.B. King, Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix, etc. That is of course the blues scales - major, minor, pentatonic - but more so the specific licks and bends of the strings used by the old blues masters.

Playing Through The Blues also has a thorough tutorial on chords, including the spicy extensions to get the real blues sound. And of course the "turnarounds" and ending licks for completion of the solos.

The ebook guitar course is accompanied by audio samples, most of them both slow and fast, for every example in the book. And there's two hours of close-up videos too, with Griff demonstrating all of the examples on his guitar.

You also get 10 jam tracks with real musicians to play along with. Listen to an example here.

In the "blues masters's section" of this guitar course you get transcribed examples from tunes recorded by such artists as Eric Clapton, Freddie King, B.B. King and Albert King.
And complete solos by Griff himself, written in both music and tab notation and with audio examples included. You can see an example of that here.

Playing Through The Blues is a very comprehensive and recommendable guitar course for just $47!
Click Here To Buy!

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DUBTurbo

DUBTurbo 1.5 is a software application primarily for making hiphop and urban beats on your PC or Mac. But a lot of other modern genres are covered with the 4 sample packs that comes with it,  plus an additional  "movie and mood" and "DT Instrumentals". Everything royalty free.

It bridges the gap between very limited loop software with low quality sound (mp3) and professional audio production software.
All sound kits and instruments are in cd-quality stereo at 44.1 kHz, 16 bit wav-format.

DUBTurbo has an easy interface and the option of using the computer keyboard to play melodies or drum beats.

You can even import your own sounds! So, even though you've got 1000's of sounds to work with, right out of the box, you are not limited by it. And everything done in DUBTurbo can be exported to other audio production software - in case you should outgrow the limits of DUBTurbo's 16 tracks and the lack of MIDI connections.

Comprehensive training videos covers it all. Look at the video, hear the sound - and bear in mind that what you hear is in reduced sound quality (mpeg4) compared to the real thing!
Very cool for an incredible … $39.95!

Click Here!

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ProProach - Piano Voicings

Dave Longo

I don't know about you, but I'm tired of piano courses that promise me, not only to play fluently with perfect hand coordination in weeks, so that I will amaze family, friends and even talent scouts, but also that I will be able to write award winning songs within a few months.

Nah, let's face it: it takes a lot of practice to play the piano well. And even if your only goal is to be able to play songs, either by ear or from lead sheets, there is more to it than just knowing which notes go into a certain chord.

It's called voicings, how you arrange or distribute the notes in a chord. And that is what Dave Longo's ProProach course is about. It has a motto: "To play like a pro, think like a pro", and that's what he wants to teach in 25 weekly video lessons, accompanied by ebook pdfs with the stuff explained in text and a graphical keyboard with colored keys for the chords.

Here below I have put a little excerpt from Dave Longo's first, free video lesson, so you can watch his teaching style. He is very engaged, maybe even a little high-strung, but you'll get used to that, I'm sure. There's a graphical keyboard on top of his real keyboard, so you can see his hands playing, and at the same time see the blue keys play by themselves on the graphical keyboard. That's a great thing, 'cause it's very good to see how the hands and fingers move on the keyboard, but sometimes it can be a little difficult to see which keys are actually pressed. The no-hands keyboard takes care of that obstacle!

But the course is not only about voicings of individual chords, it deals with chord progressions, and how fine pianists like Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans would do it. Dave shows how to incorporate them into popular songs, like Burt Bacharach's Alfie, Hoagy Carmichael's Georgia On My Mind, Errol Garner's Misty and Over The Rainbow from The Wizard Of Oz. A lot of it is about extended chords (9, 11, 13) in that kind of context.

The 25 lessons in the ProProach piano course come once a week, 'cause Dave would like you to play around with the stuff from each lesson. Transposing to other keys is one thing, but also to encourage the creative aspect, developing your own style as you get into it.

As Dave Longo says: "The doors are opening and the wheels are turning!"

$79 and You're In!

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Guitar Scale Mastery

Craig Bassett has a method for developing mastery of scales on the guitar that has some obvious advantages - but I haven't seen it before, and never thought about guitar scales that way.

Guitar Scale Mastery is a 3-year membership online guitar course about scales and soloing. Craig's "scale weapon #1" is single string scales! And odd as it might seem, this will really make you aware of the note positions all over the guitar's fretboard.

The course progresses with two string scales and then, not three string scales, but three notes per string exercises. This basic concept is promising; It will teach your way around the fretboard in a very structured way.

Other elements in the guitar course are ear training and application of the scales into focused lick creation and improvisation.

The Guitar Scale Activators are special backing tracks to make practicing scales and licks enjoyable and to give you practical experience of chord/scale relationships.

Guitar Scale Mastery is improving and growing, and so there are bonus updates throughout the membership period.

One thing I like about Craig Bassett's guitar course is that he doesn't try to lure anybody into it with promises of stardom and magical tricks that will change your abilities in weeks.

He clearly states that this guitar course is for the intermediate guitarist with a basic knowledge of tablature notation and scales, one that enjoys practicing and would like to develop soloing skills.

Seems worth the price: $47 - Pick It Here!

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Make A Marimba

Mallet instruments appeal to a lot of people. Maybe because the sound is a refined, tuned version of everyday experiences: from knocks on a table or a wooden chair to the pings from metal pipes in a railing or a signpost.

But if you decide to buy a marimba, glockenspiel, vibraphone or xylophone, chances are high that you don't go through with it, after seeing the prices in a music store!  But why not build it yourself? It's not that hard.

Jim McCarthy, an experienced drum and percussion clinician, went ahead with it, and he is now offering building instructions for glockenspiel, xylophone, vibraphone, two, three and 4-5 octave marimbas. You can build a three octave marimba for less than 500 bucks!

Your marimba will probably not look as fancy as a Musser or Yamaha - but you will save a lot and take pride in having made it!

Jim McCarthy knows what he is talking about, and he describes the building process very well in advance.

Click Here!

In this video Jim builds a marimba.
Background music is played on the very same.

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Lilypond - free music notation software

Lilypond lead sheet

Lilypond is a free music notation program with high quality output, running on GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

Lilypond is an Open Source program, a "compiler" that formats simple text files into music notation of the finest sort. It was the initial concern of the programmers to produce music pages that would match the beauty of hand engraved scores.
This is how it works:

You write:

You get:

Read more about the text input system here.
So you will have to learn the language of the program, step by step, much as you would learn HTML codes for web pages and forums. But this is not a "here's the code, do whatever you can with it" type of application. The tutorials are great, and there is a substantial and idealistic support for Lilypond.

Here is an example of the more advanced things Lilypond will do:

Goyescas by Enrique Granados

It's free, so there's nothing to loose! Try It Out!

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