We are honored to by selected by Tutorful as one of the Best Piano Resources. Tutorful, the UK’s leading tuition marketplace, surveyed 60,000 of their students, parents and tutors to recommend the best ways to learn piano. Playground Sessions made the shortlist. This selection would not be possible without our thousands of users! We would like to thank all of you who voted in Tutorful’s survey, and we would like to thank Tutorful for featuring us!

How To Learn To Play Piano: The Ultimate List For Beginners

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The post Playground Sessions — Best Piano Resource by Tutorful appeared first on Playground Sessions Blog.

Our exhibitor booth, complete with a Yamaha keyboard and Bose speakers, was the perfect setup for people to get a sense of the power of Playground Sessions. One of our greatest assets, as we’re constantly reminded of by our users, is our library of current popular songs, arranged in different difficulty levels, and their backing tracks. Having a setup that featured these elements of our program proved to make a great first impression.

The amount of positive feedback we received from the teachers who came to our booth to use Playground was amazing! People stopped by, sat at our “play station”, picked their favorite songs to play from our song store, selected the difficulty level (most of the teachers picked our Advanced arrangements), then performed those songs for everyone who stood by, often stopping other attendees in their footsteps!

Popular songs included “Feather Theme (Main Title)” from Forrest Gump (click the image below to watch it performed):

“The Girl from Ipanema” by Antonio Carlos Jobim (click the image below to watch it performed):

“Can’t Stop The Feeling!” by Justin Timberlake (click the image below to watch it performed):

And “Closer” by The Chainsmokers (click the image below to watch it performed):

By the end of the 3-day conference, many teachers had signed up to use our program for their classrooms or their private lessons. What piano teachers expressed that they loved most about Playground Sessions was:

• Our selection of current popular songs and that they were arranged in different difficulty levels (Rookie, Intermediate, Advanced)
• How good the background tracks sounded
• That we offered the ability to earn points, stars, and badges, which make the program fun to use
• That we have a section of the app (Bootcamp) that focuses on teaching different piano concepts, which they can use as supplemental content for their lessons.

We’re excited by how our program was received by those in attendance at the MTNA conference. As we continue to innovate and improve Playground Sessions, we’re looking forward to rolling out our “Teacher’s Portal” which will allow teachers to easily manage and track the progress of their students. Stay tuned for more information to be provided on this new portal soon.

The post MTNA Conference 2017 – Baltimore appeared first on Playground Sessions Blog.

You can download the new version here:

https://www.playgroundsessions.com/support/downloads

Change Log

Lesson Player

• Fixed glitch with cancelled practice records
• Removed tempo slider from toolbar
• Improved custom tempo prompt to show slow, normal tempos better and allow 200% of normal tempo.
• Metronome is now defaulted to be on.
• Videos are now 75% smaller in file size for quicker downloads and smaller hard disk requirements

Application Updates

• Shows multiple version updates (if user hasn’t updated in a while).
• Version data is now shared across the system, so the version numbers that show up on the website will also be the same as the update screens.

Manage My Lessons prompt

• You can now search by lesson name
• You can now view installed lessons, where as before you could only see lessons the server said you had bought. This is useful for when you on are a computer with multiple accounts.

In App Forum Browser

• Back, home, forward buttons
• URL bar (can’t edit, but can view)
• Copy URL button for sharing the url with others

Courses

• New UI for showing / access more courses.
• We will be rolling out the first few extracurricular courses in the next couple weeks

Song Store

• Now shows more relevant song on main page.

Offline Mode

• Offline mode now gives you a nice score dialog.
• Major UI improvements for offline mode.
• Courses now show up in offline mode.

Settings

• Can now control sound effect volume.

Let us know what you think about the update in our forum:

https://forums.playgroundsessions.com/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=11761&p=14986

And keep an eye out for more updates coming in the near future!

The post Playground Sessions 2.5 appeared first on Playground Sessions Blog.

Today we’re excited to announce a big update to our iPad app: it now supports videos!!

This is a huge step forward in bringing big features and functionality to tablet versions of Playground Sessions.

Along with this, we’ve also added some huge improvements, including the ability to play Playground’s interactive sheet music lessons using the app’s on-screen keyboard instead of a physical keyboard. Our on-screen keyboard now supports multi-touch (you can play and hear more than one note at a time) and can be used in the lesson player for real-time feedback.

We’ve also updated the iPad app with the same keyboard configuration process that you experience on the desktop version (playing the far left key, then the far right key), allowing you to now configure the on-screen keyboard to match the size of your actual keyboard.

Thank you all for your suggestions, requests, and patience as we continue to improve our iPad app. We hope everybody enjoys this new version. Let us know, in the comments section below, what major features you’d like to see added to the iPad next!

Change Log

• On-Screen Keyboard
  • Now can play more than one note at a time.
  • Now can use in lesson player, for when you don’t have a keyboard with you.
• Lesson Player
  • Video player with notation-sync
  • Minor performance improvements for sheet music
• Lesson Library
  • Removed checksum checking (lessons download much quicker now)
• Login Prompt
  • Moved input prompts up to allow more space for onscreen keyboard (soft keyboard)
• Settings -> Piano
  • 85 key option replaced with 88 key option.
  • “Custom” keyboard option added to configure the on-screen keyboard to match your actual keyboard.
• Updates System
  • We’ve added in a new update check system that will notify users of updates, similar to how the desktop version of Playground does today.

The post Playground Sessions for iPad Version 2.0 appeared first on Playground Sessions Blog.

These songs are all available in Rookie, Intermediate, and Advanced levels. Click on any song’s album art above to pick up your copy! Happy playing!

The post New Songs: John Legend, Taylor Swift, Christina Perri, and Tchaikovsky appeared first on Playground Sessions Blog.

Why learn piano online?

Online piano lessons have quickly become one of the most popular and fastest growing ways for people to learn how to play. Given its affordability and the convenience it affords, it’s no wonder that it’s a steadily growing industry.

As the online piano lesson industry continues to grow and fill up with more and more products, it becomes more and more important to understand how these products set themselves apart from one another. Which ones work online and which work offline? Which ones use real audio backing tracks and which use MIDI backing tracks? Which offer real-time feedback and which don’t offer feedback at all? These are just some of the ways that piano teaching programs in the digital age differentiate themselves from one another.

TopTenReviews recognizes Playground Sessions

In their latest assessment, TopTenReviews focused on elements like these and compared them among what it categorized as the top 10 online piano lessons. After completing the reviews, Playground Sessions was awarded the Gold Award and labeled the best way to learn the piano online! Needless to say, we are extremely happy and proud to be considered the best way to learn to play the piano online by TopTenReviews. At Playground Sessions we work really hard to provide the best piano learning experience through the use of our technology, gaming elements, and scoring features. It’s great to see others share in our passion for our product.

Click here to check out their review.

The post The best way to learn piano online appeared first on Playground Sessions Blog.

New Lesson Player

We completely revamped our Lesson Player to better use screen space and give users better visualization of their progress

• New Lesson Player Section Navigation
  • Shows all sections in great detail
  • Easily see which lesson & section you are on.
  • Shows complete / incomplete status of each section
  • Shows user’s best accuracy
  • Has two modes: open and close, to allow users to better use Playground with different screen sizes.
• New Lesson Player Toolbar
  • Newly designed icons / functionality.
  • Easily see which lesson & section you are on.
  • We moved all functionality into one easy to use toolbar – no more hunting to find a feature.
  • Newly added Next / Previous buttons to easily navigate sections
  • Can now set custom tempos.
  • Shortcuts for quickly jumping into progress visualizations, settings, or printing.
  • Can now record in practice mode and / or use metronome in performance mode.
• Sheet Music
  • Now can zoom with ctrl / cmd + mousewheel.
  • Larger display to fit more notation on the screen.
  • Fixed issue with collapsing and expanding panels.
  • Piano Demo is no longer played with high velocity & staccato
  • Slow accompaniments no longer have issue with start position
  • Improved performance.
• Scoring
  • Now users can earn a max of 3 stars per song.
  • Performance mode no longer has very high scores.
  • New “level reached” prompt.
  • New “badge awarded” prompt.

OGG & FLAC Accompaniments

• Users can now select from 5 different bit rates:
  • OGG (44 kbps)
  • OGG (128 kbps), this is the new default
  • OGG (320 kbps)
  • FLAC (lossless)
  • WAV (lossless)

• Dramatically smaller disk requirements per lesson.
• Dramatically faster downloads.

Installation / Login

• Multiple users can now log in on the same computer.
• No more license key required.
• No more slow sync process, making login time very quick!
• Sound Effects!

Dashboard

• New offline mode display.
• New level / point display in top right corner.
• New “return to lesson” display in bottom left.
• Removed banners from features.
• Reorganized tabs, including new in-app forums tab.

Scoring / Badges

• Rebuilt badge system to more accurately award and record badges.
• New leveling system.
• Performance mode now gives similar points to practice.
• 3 stars instead of 5.

Bootcamp Tab

• Improved navigation between Rookie, Intermediate, Advanced Bootcamps.
• Now displays number of completed sections in tile.
• Now shows check mark when lesson is complete.
• New left side menu shows all sections and allows user to pick which section they would like to enter.

My Songs Tab

• Now displays number of completed sections in tile.
• Now shows stars when full song has been performed.
• New left side menu shows all sections and allows user to pick which section they would like to enter.
• Now shows greater detail about lesson difficulty.

Song Store Tab

• We now accept PayPal!
• New song layout page.
• Can now select billing profile.
• New “select a membership” page.

Let us know what you think about the update in our forum: https://playgroundsessions.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=5547

And keep an eye out for more updates coming in the near future!

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http://mmrmagazine.com/2019-playground-sessions-and-yamaha-music-interactive-enter-partnership.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=headlines

We look forward to building our relationship with Yamaha as we continue on our path to inspire and help create more and more musicians around the world! Special thank you to Jason Nyberg over at Yamaha for always believing in us.

The post Playground Sessions and Yamaha Corporation of America partnership appeared first on Playground Sessions Blog.

Showcase

The first day at the conference, Chris Vance (CEO) hosted an hour-long showcase of Playground Sessions to a room of teachers. As the room filled up, many teachers were excited about the technology that Playground offered and the popular songs the program taught its users. Chris demonstrated Playground’s features as well as how Playground could be used as a great supplemental tool for teachers. Once the teachers saw Playground in action, they loved it! The end of the showcase was filled with questions from various teachers as to how they could get signed up, how they could sign their students up, and where they could learn more information.

After the showcase, our display booth was flooded with consistent traffic of teachers and students who wanted to test out the program.  We enjoyed demonstrating Playground’s use and technology to all who stopped by, but we especially enjoyed the enthusiasm we received from different students.  After all, it’s the students who would be spending the most time on Playground Sessions – so if we can get excitement out of them, we know we’re doing something right!

One of the most exciting things about this conference was the attendance of Lang Lang. He hosted a piano masterclass and announced the release of his new “Technique” books for piano players. Although he didn’t perform any full length pieces, he did dazzle the crowd while playing excerpts from his books.

After Lang Lang’s classes, he spent some time on the main showroom, where Chris was able to share a few words with him.

Being that this was the first conference we attended that catered to music teachers, our goal was to raise awareness of our product amongst institutional and private piano instructors.  By the end of the conference we made a lot of great contacts and reached a lot of people who were as passionate about our mission and our product as we are.  The 2015 MTNA Conference was a success and we look forward to attending the next one!

The post MTNA Conference 2015 recap appeared first on Playground Sessions Blog.

After arriving at the news station in downtown Salt Lake City and signing in with the receptionist, Sean (our head of technology) and I sat in the waiting room while watching the live coverage of the news. Before long, we were called into the “Tech Talk” studio where I was then mic’d up while waiting for my segment.

The interview was conducted by Lori Prichard, and was short, sweet, and a lot of fun!

Thanks again to Jennifer Hardman and Kristine Pratt for helping set this all up, and to Lori and the entire KSL team for the opportunity!

-David

The post KSL Browser 5.0 Interview with David Sides appeared first on Playground Sessions Blog.