For some reason, every time you search for something for free on the internet, you find yourself in a lot of strange sites, full of advertisements and, sometimes, created exclusively for the collection of e-mail addresses or for the sale of a product . This is especially true when it comes to sites on the Internet that offer free lessons to learn how to do or study something. For example, the search for free websites to learn how to play the piano are almost all poor, with at most a couple of free lessons. Unfortunately, in Italian there are very few online resources and practically only old sites are found without any maintenance and practical interactivity. Given that to learn how to play the piano you definitely need lessons taken by an expert teacher, I want to suggest very useful online tools to get started, so, before you understand if you like it or not and become good, you could start learning the piano with free lessons interactive on the internet .
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The sites are in English and are interactive, that is, for each theoretical lesson, there is also a flash animation, an application or a video showing the practice and which can be followed with the piano in front. The selection of the sites was made taking into account the fact that the author of the site does not want to sell something to the user but simply teaches how to play the piano by putting his experience and expertise into play.
The best sites for learning to play the piano are:
1) Flowkey is a very innovative web app that allows anyone, even those who have never studied music and musical notes, to learn to play the piano. Designed for beginners and also for expert pianists, it offers interactive tutorials and lessons to follow at your own pace, very visual and also to be faced as if it were a game.
2) Pianu is a truly original site that allows you to learn to play the piano in a simple and fun way. Pianu has two great features: first of all, there is a list of songs to play, which are listed according to the difficulty, from beginner to expert. The songs work a bit like in the Rockband game, and you have to press the keys to be pressed that are seen coming down from the top of the screen, when they fall on the key, keeping it pressed until the next note. In more advanced songs, on the other hand, you have to manage, in addition to the keys, the times. The second great feature is the Pianu Academy, a paid service with interactive piano lessons all online, very targeted, for beginners and experts. The Academy also teaches how to read sheet music, how to play chords and more. The first lesson is free, while the full package costs only $ 35.
3) Skoove is a site with an interactive app that allows you to follow the notes to be played on the screen and know if you are pressing the right keys. The site requires free registration to be used and it can also be used as an iPhone app. You can then take piano lessons at different levels of difficulty (therefore for those who start, but also for those who are already experts).
3) OnlinePianist is a free web application that allows you to learn to play the piano online by following tutorials and interactive lessons. Basically, you can see the keys pressed and the chords, while some famous songs are played so that you can follow and replicate them. Lesson playback can be slowed down if needed. There are three difficulty levels, with different songs to play on the piano. For every music there are all the scores, the lyrics and the necessary information, with explanations.
4) Zebra Keys, full of lessons to follow for free . Each of the lessons is written in a clear and simple way even if you are not an expert in English. The exceptional thing, however, is the presence of an interactive piano keyboard, integrated directly into the articles, very useful for putting into practice what you are learning. The keys of the online piano are marked with the letter that corresponds to the note so you don't have to know how to read a score because you just have to follow the letters. After having progressed through some lessons and want to play directly from the computer, there are, scrolling the page of the lessons downwards, Virtual Piano Chords Chart, a virtual keyboard that shows all the notes and chords and Virtual Piano Keyboard a real piano online to play with mouse or keyboard from the computer. In this way it becomes easier to play music because you don't have to kill yourself to remember the notes.
Among the online tools on this excellent site, the most useful and effective are the trainers (Note Trainer and KeyBoard Trainer) which, interactively, allow you to learn to recognize notes on scores, how they are played and how they are written. There are also other very useful online tools integrated with videos, to recognize ear notes and to associate piano keys with a sound.
5) On the PerfectPitch site there is a little game where you have to guess, listened to a piano sound, which note was played .
6) PianoNanny is one of the best sites for online piano learning.
In this case the lessons are absolutely detailed and written by experts . The lessons are divided for students who start the first time, for intermediates and for expert musicians for a total of 34. Each article is very discursive so perhaps you will need to use a translation tool, however it is, there are several images supplied and, pressing the "Show 12 Notes" button that is there, you can open, in a window, the piano with which to perform what is explained and practice on the PC.
7) Pianosolo is the most important Italian site to talk about Piano, with interviews with the best artists, reviews and then also lessons, tutorials and free sheet music.
8) Plern Piano is a web application that acts as a virtual piano teacher.
With Plern Piano you can, in a fun way, compose a music from scratch or import the midi file to learn how to play it. Plern Piano, through a graphic representation, indicates precisely each key to be pressed and the duration of the note. In the end, playing becomes almost like playing tetris .
9) BerkleeShares is a site that contains Berklee College of Music's free piano lessons. Beginning in 2003, Berklee College of Music began offering free online music lessons for guitar, brass, bass and also for DJs.
When you click on the Keyboards section you will find a list of lessons both in YouTube video format and as a PDF document. The videos last about two minutes while the PDF documents are supplemented by music clips. Clearly they are very short and can only be used to integrate other resources, not to learn the piano from scratch.
10) MusicTheory is another free web portal that can teach you to play the piano with 37 interactive lessons, 10 web applications and 3 music utilities. Practice web applications are similar to those of Zebra Keys, but there are many more. The lessons are very thorough and always offer an online keyboard to test and try the techniques learned.
11) For Macs only, you can always use Apple's excellent GarageBand with interactive piano and guitar lessons, with videos and instruments to play on the computer. If you know similar sites in Italian or others with these characteristics, let them know without a doubt!
Finally, I remember that in other articles you will find: the program to learn to play with guides and exercises, how to write music on the PC, the best online keyboards with piano and the game to play the piano in Guitar Hero style.
