Instant Piano Practice

I’m still doing my piano practice every day. I can just about play “The Entertainer” without falling off the seat. Apparently the trick is not to practice until you can play something right. You have to practice until you can’t play it wrong. In my experience the difference is at least one order of magnitude.

But I digress. Today I hit on a wizard wheeze to keep my piano practice scores tip top. I’m using Simply Piano which has a bunch of sheet music (including Steely Dan) which you can learn from. You play the song and the program tracks what you are doing and marks you. I’ve connected the keyboard to the iPad over MIDI for optimal note tracking. And the piano can record and playback tunes that you tap out. So, all I have to do is record the song once and then I can get get a few minutes of piano playing credit just by pressing the play button.

I’m fully aware that what I’m doing here is cheating myself, in that I don’t think watching a tune being played automatically will improve my skills much. But I’m definitely going to have a go just to see if I can make it work. And I really wish I’d had access to this technology when I was around 11 years and forced to do 20 minutes of practice every darned day when I’d really be rather doing anything else.