Ratings: Ease of Use, Performance: 23/25, Look & Feel: 23/25, Features 22/25, How much I enjoy 23/25
Total: 91/100
Piano Wizard is not only a MIDI piano keyboard and a music learning program but an entire lesson plan to easily help anyone learn piano. Piano Wizard includes the MIDI keyboard with several adjustments and connections for a very good MIDI keyboard and the piano lessons to learn how to play.
The Piano Wizard comes with the MIDI keyboard, the Piano Wizard program, configuration CD, Live Lite 5 demo, USB cable, reusable keyboard color stickers, MIDI Keyboard manual and setup poster. Live Lite 5 is a computer synthesizer program that has a very wide selection of tools to digitally mix and record your own music.
The MIDI keyboard is a very nice almost professional keyboard with four octaves or sets of keys. The keyboard can be connected to your computer with the USB cable and does not require any further power other than that supplied through the USB cable and your computer. The keyboard can also be connected to other devices using the MIDI out connector such as an amplifier and speakers. This would probably require an additional power cord that is not supplied by the company. A universal power adapter will work just fine and is readily available in most department stores such as Wal-Mart.
Piano Wizard is very easy to use and to start with you simply install the configuration program onto your computer that sets up the MIDI keyboard. The Piano Wizard program is an easy to follow lesson set that starts out with a very simple game to learn how to play the piano.
Following the Setup Poster you simply place the stickers that are color coded onto the keys of the MIDI keyboard. You just follow the instructions and skip the first C key for both the white and black key in each octave of keys.
In the program you should start at lesson 1 which has you simply pressing the correct colored key when an object such as an egg hits a line across the displayed keyboard on your computer screen. The objects will be rising from the bottom of the screen to the top with the keyboard shown at the top with the line across it.
This is your first and simple lesson that introduces the keyboard and basic concepts of the entire lesson of learning piano. Every time you use the lessons you are practicing and getting the keyboard and finger exercises down. You are also learning notes but you don’t realize it yet.
You can change some basic settings like the numbering of what fingers you should be using for each note or the names of the notes you should be playing. When you play your lesson the first lesson has the notes going upward from the bottom of the screen but they change this for the second lesson just like sheet music from the right to the left. The notes scroll across the screen and you are supposed to press the colored key when the note gets near the line.
As you continue in your lessons you can change some of the settings from seeing the colorful and fun backgrounds that make the Piano Wizard more like a video game than a lesson. You can change the keyboard orientation from notes traveling from the bottom upwards to the right to left and the background from a variety of cute and fun backgrounds to the boring sheet music type.
Each song you play has the appropriate color for what key you should be pressing so you follow along in the song and press the appropriate key when the note is hitting the line. The entire screen is open so that you have time to get a look at the notes and have a chance to memorize some of them as you play. The lessons have many options for things like the right or left hand you want to practice with or both, the keyboard setup in regards to which way the keyboard is and which way the notes are going and the colored stickers being on the keys or not.
With all these options you can go from having a fun and interesting as well as easy way to play notes of a song to learning the notes and how to read sheet music as well as play the piano. The Piano Wizard goes from nice slow and easy songs to faster and more complex pieces with more notes. When you start at lesson one you only play two notes of the song with the wizard playing the rest of the notes so you have a chance to learn the notes and piano.
These lessons are nice finger exercises and allow you to play at your speed and using the hands you need for more practice. Using the Piano Wizard is an easy way for kids to learn how to play the piano by a fun and interesting, almost video game quality lesson. The backgrounds are interchangeable from a dinosaur to a space theme and a few others. The objects that rise or move that correspond to the notes can also be changed so that kids don’t get bored quickly with the lessons at the beginning.
Once they are interested in the piano and start to get used to playing you can shake things up and graduate them to the higher lessons, remove the backgrounds or change the screen orientation. This shows the kids that they are becoming more of a piano player and gives them an accomplishment that can be part of their lessons.
Piano Wizard can also import music so you can play the music you want on whatever level you want to. The importing is done through a MIDI format so you would need to purchase the songs in MIDI format from the internet or convert them using a file converter. If you cannot find music you want to play in MIDI format you can also to purchase them through the Piano Wizard website at $2.99 a song or purchase a subscription to their collection for more.
You can check out their website for more information about their MIDI format music collection. I was able to find several websites with free downloads of MIDI formatted music and a few converters that worked to convert the music but many of the converters will cost. The free downloads are easy to use and it may change some of the song but the same tone and music is there, without the words of course.
Reading music is done by the color stickers and using the labels on the keyboard itself. It might help in this area to check out the internet and find some more information about reading sheet music and what all those symbols mean but you do get a good idea by practicing.
Using not only the Piano Wizard but being able to pick and choose music helps to learn how to play the piano and make it more fun and less like a choir. Piano Wizard is an easy way to make learning the piano fun and easy. I highly recommend Piano Wizard for a great way to learn the piano for kids and adults.
