Rocket Piano Review

Learn to Play Piano Online

Rocket Piano is hands-down the most popular piano instruction course available online today. Is it worth your money?

Quick Summary: I am very impressed with the quality of the Rocket Piano course and software, as well as the ease of use.

For less than the cost of two lessons in my studio, you can instantly have a piano course that will take you from complete beginner to competent pianist.

Honestly, I didn't expect to be this impressed with a learn-at-home piano course that costs less than $40. So I'm thrilled to be able to recommend an inexpensive, excellent course for people who want to learn to play piano at home -- Rocket Piano.

Rocket Piano: What You Get

Rocket Piano is sold for $39.95 for the downloadable version and $199.95 if you want physical books and DVDs shipped to you. You get the following:

BOOKS:

• Beginner Book
• Intermediate Book
• Advanced Book
• Introduction to Jazz Piano
• Introduction to Gospel Piano
• Fingering Technique and Exercises Book
• Advanced Learning Techniques for Piano

57 video lessons that take you through the course materials

SOFTWARE:

• Jayde Musica: learn to read music with a fun game!
• Perfect Your Pitch Pro: learn relative pitch
• Chordinator: learn to recognize written chords
• Keycellerator: learn to recognize chords on the keyboard
• Metronome: learn to keep time while you play

PLUS:

A six-lesson total beginner course
Audio tracks for all the method books
Jam tracks to play along with
5 additional Q & A videos with Ruth Searle
A 30-day free trial to Song Pond
Extensive help files
Specials and unannounced bonuses

Rocket Piano: The Course Books

The Rocket Piano course books are interactive PDF eBooks, with links inside them to the appropriate video and audio files you need during the lessons. So, while you will have quite a lot of videos and audio files to download, it is easy to access them from your course materials.

Also, the videos are iPod friendly, and the audio files are in MP3 format, so your lessons can be portable!

Beginner Book
You don't have to have any piano knowledge to start with the beginner book. You'll learn about the history of the piano, good posture, keys, note names, and scales, chords, and arpeggios (great stuff for a first-level book).

You'll also get the basics on melody and harmony and start learning the basic rhythms you need.

Intermediate Book
The intermediate book will start introducing you to different key signatures. You'll also learn about different time signatures (ever wonder why a waltz sounds so different from a march or a piece of pop music?).

You'll start to learn to enhance your performance with dynamics. You'll also start learning more complex rhythms and chords and get an introduction to the jazz and gospel sounds.

Advanced Book
This is where Rocket Piano starts to take you beyond what some other learn-at-home piano courses teach. You'll learn about chord progressions and beginning songwriting; the importance of sight reading; and the circle of fifths, which is the relationship that ties all of the key signatures together.

You'll also learn transposition (changing a song into another key) and improvisation -- another technique not taught in classical piano lessons or other piano courses. But it's such a freeing skill to be able to sit at the piano and just play without music in front of you!

Fingering Technique and Exercises
This book is just what it says, a nice collection of exercises to help you learn to use your fingers independently and with control.

Advanced Learning Techniques for Piano
This book is a great read on how we learn and how to practice piano effectively. Many of these concepts are ones that I have used with students successfully!

Rocket Piano: The Software

I'm a big fan of anything fun that helps you learn to read music, and Jayde Musica fits that description. One of the hardest things about learning to play the piano is becoming fluent at note reading - it's like learning a foreign language!

Jayde Musica runs in your browser, and notes fly across the screen for you to identify. You can choose your level (easy, medium, hard) your clef, and whether to keep notes on the staff or allow notes with ledger lines. Good stuff!

Chordinator is a program that helps you learn to recognize chords written out on the staff. Keycelerator helps you recognize chords on the keyboard. These are terrific additions to the Rocket Piano method!

Learning chords and accompaniment is a fun and easy way to feel and sound like you're "really playing piano" even as a beginner.

Perfect Your Pitch Pro is, I think, the most unexpected and best part of Rocket Piano. I didn't start taking ear training and working on relative pitch recognition (learning to hear intervals in music) until I was in college!

This will dramatically improve your playing, because you will start to understand what you are hearing - and you'll be able to look at music and start to know what it should sound like.

Even better, this skill is what will help you be able to replicate music you hear -- so if you want to teach yourself to play something you heard on the radio, this will help you!

The final piece of software included with the Rocket Piano course is a full-featured metronome. When I opened this program for the first time, it actually made me laugh -- it's a picture of an actual mechanical metronome, and it works just like one, with the swinging weighted arm.

Even better, it's a nice, comforting click rather than an annoying beep or other electronic sound like some online metronomes. Really a quality piece of software.

Well Worth the Money!

I think Rocket Piano is well worth the $39.95 price tag - it could be sold for much, much more.

If you want to learn to play piano at home, this course is a terrific choice for you. Not only is it inexpensive, but it is thorough, well-designed, and covers quite a few musical styles and techniques that traditional classical lessons don't: chord method, improvisation, jazz & gospel.

The course books are in friendly PDF format, and the software is available for both Mac and PC (this is a big deal to me, a Mac user, who often gets left out in the cold with "custom software.")

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, you can be starting your journey to playing piano in just a few moments with this terrific course!