piano
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Ubisoft's Rocksmith+ guitar-learning app now teaches piano
Ubisoft’s Rocksmith+ guitar-learning platform just got an update for piano players. A single subscription allows access to every instrument and title under Rocksmith’s umbrella, including 400 newly-released piano compositions.
Loog's baby digital piano could be the perfect starter instrument for newbies
Loog is back with a new starter instrument to help amateur piano players get their footing. The Loog Piano features built-in speakers, detailed digital models and a gorgeous aesthetic.
Roland's 50th Anniversary Concept Piano has flying speakers for some reason
Roland's 50th Anniversary Concept Piano is undeniably gorgeous and has flying speakers for some reason.
Roli's redesigned Seaboard Rise keyboard offers more precise playing
Roli, the builder of unconventional musical instruments, has just announced the Seaboard Rise 2, a totally revamped version of its older Seaboard Rise keyboard. It's available for pre-order today.
Casio made a super fun singing keyboard
Casio's CT-S100V is a super fun singing keyboard. It's just a shame it's so damn expensive.
Google's latest Chrome experiment lets you jam on a piano with friends
Google's Shared Piano lets you create a virtual practice room and play piano, strings, drums and more with your friends.
Roland's Alexa-powered keyboard is available for $500
It took nearly an entire year, but Roland's voice-savvy GO:PIANO keyboard is now available. Spend $500 (and enable a Roland skill) and you can use Alexa to choose sounds, turn on the metronome and control numerous other settings while you play -- you don't have to lift your fingers off the keys or wade through indecipherable menus. This also turns your keyboard into a full-fledged Alexa speaker, making it one of the few Amazon-powered devices that you can use to perform alongside the music you're listening to.
Brave musical hero speedruns 'GoldenEye' level with a piano
The 1997 N64 classic GoldenEye 007 was a game that introduced first-person shooters to millions of new gamers, even if it did cause the occasional family squabble.
Steinway releases high-tech piano that records your performance
Legendary piano maker Steinway & Sons has released a piano that allows musicians to record their own live performances. Each Spirio | r comes with an iPad Pro and accompanying app that allows users to record, play back and edit their own songs in Steinway's own high-resolution audio format.
One's Smart Piano helped me play, but not understand
As a kid, I was given a book about a famous doctor who may or may not have been Albert Schweitzer. The first chapter is how he, as a young boy, learned the value of practice from his music teacher. It was a lesson he learned early enough to become not only a virtuoso musician but also a physician and philosopher. I suspect I was given the tome as a way of encouraging me to practice the piano in the hope of becoming as good as ol' Albo. That didn't quite happen.
Google’s Piano Genie lets anyone improvise classical music
Google has taken the idea of Rock Band and Guitar Hero and pushed it one step further, creating an intelligent controller that lets you improvise on the piano and makes it sound like you actually know what you're doing, no matter how unskilled you are. The controller is called Piano Genie, and it comes from Google's Magenta research project. Powered by a neural network trained on classical piano music, Piano Genie translates what you tap out on eight buttons into music that uses all 88 piano keys.
This DIY cardboard piano syncs with your favorite MIDI music apps
From an interactive booklet that helps you build six different electronic toys to Nintendo's own Labo cardboard gadgets, DIY cardboard gizmos and musical instruments are all the rage. Now a company headed up by a former Konami and Sony game developer has taken to Kickstarter for its own folding paper piano, called the Kami-Oto.
Yamaha's AI transformed a dancer into a pianist
Artificial intelligence is already everywhere, so it's inevitable that it would invade the arts. Yamaha showed a new kind of AI tech that translated the movements of renowned dancer Kaiji Moriyama into musical notes on a piano, "a form of expression that fuses body movements and music," the company said. He used it during a concert in Tokyo entitled Mai Hi Ten Yu, dancing and "playing" the piano with his body, accompanied by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra Scharoun Ensemble.
The best digital piano for students
By John Higgins This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter, reviews for the real world. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter's independently chosen editorial picks, it may earn affiliate commissions that support its work. Read the full article here. After researching more than 80 digital console pianos and testing nine with a panel of professionals and amateurs, we think the Yamaha Arius YDP-181 is the best digital console piano for a student who doesn't want an acoustic piano because of space or budget considerations. Its action has a good feel, the piano sounds are excellent, the control panel is well laid out and easy to navigate, and the piano comes with a bench. It's an excellent choice for a beginning or intermediate student and should ease the transition to an acoustic instrument as they progress.
Yamaha's MX88 synth turns your iPhone into a real instrument
I hate, hate, hate computers and phones/tablets on stage. To me, a Macbook sitting next to a keyboardist or percussionist is just asking for trouble. Computers freeze, apps crash and sometimes you forget to turn off notifications and now everyone in the audience knows you got a new Facebook message. And frankly, they're not very "rock 'n' roll." So imagine my surprise when, while using the Yamaha MX88 keyboard, I found myself launching the FM Essential companion app -- on my iPhone!
Yamaha's smart pianos work with Alexa and teach you how to play
Of the many things we expected to see at IFA 2017, cutting-edge instruments weren't one of them. But Yamaha is using its time in Berlin to showcase the Clavinova all-electric smart pianos, which use an iOS device and LEDs above each key to teach you how to play. With the Smart Pianist application, which will also be available on Android next year, you can learn how to play tracks in real-time thanks to blue and red lights that will come on every time you're supposed to hit a key. (Red LEDs are placed above white keys, blue above the black ones.) Not only that, but if you can read music, there's a chord chart being displayed on the iPad in real-time for whatever song you're playing.
Recommended Reading: Trent Reznor on Beats, Apple Music and more
In Conversation: Trent Reznor David Marchese, Vulture Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor helped craft Beats Music, the streaming service that would eventually become Apple Music after the tech giant purchased the popular headphone brand. On the heels of NIN's most recent EP release, Add Violence, the musician sat down with Vulture to chat about a range of topics. Among other things, Reznor talks Beats, Apple Music, streaming, his new music and lessons learned.
There's a tiny piano app for the MacBook Pro Touch Bar
Apple has showed off a number of uses for the newfangled MacBook Pro Touch Bar, including DJ and other music making controls. It also plays Doom, which is quite handy. When you need to do your best Elton John impression, there's an app that can help with that. Appropriately named Touch Bar Piano, the software brings 128 different instruments to that touch panel above the laptop's keyboard.
ICYMI: 3D-printed telescope, bird drone and more
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-338109{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-338109, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-338109{width:570px;display:block;} Today on In Case You Missed It: An open-source, 3D-printed telescope is being offered by the Open Space Agency so that hobbyists of all stripes can easily share their discoveries. The BionicBird drone flies by legit flapping its wings and I think I saw this in a movie once. And a video describing old musical tech has us all riveted: A behind-the-scenes view of the seven stories of pipes it takes to play the Wanamaker Grand Court Organ.
PLAYER for iOS teaches you how to play your music library
MiQ Limited has announced PLAYER, a free iOS app that analyzes songs from your device's music library and then shows you how to play those songs with chords, keys and song structure. PLAYER uses a streamlined interface and attractive UI to display song structure and chords in real-time as a song from your iOS device is played. The idea is that you see the correct chords that correspond to the song as it's being played, which teaches you to play along with the song. If you don't know a particular chord, PLAYER displays chord finger positioning for guitar, piano and ukulele at the top of the app. Before you start, the song is first sent to MiQ for analysis, which takes a few seconds. Additional features include a Discover section that allows you to see the Top Charts of songs used by PLAYER in iTunes' music library. The charts give you a taste of sample chords played in a given song as well as the option to tag a song for later purchase. PLAYER also lets you compile a set list of songs for rehearsal to save you digging around for individual songs you want to practice. Finally, a nice touch is a feature that allows you to slow down the playback of a song you're playing along to. It's a great tool for when you're first learning a song and everything's a bit too fast for you to keep up with. Regarding song analysis, unfortunately no app is going to correctly predict and place all the chords of a given song. And PLAYER is no exception. Your mileage will vary depending on the style and production of the song you're listing to. For best results, you need to give as much attention to listening to the musical makeup of a song as you do looking at the chords being displayed in the app. In short, PLAYER is an easy to use, well designed app. It's a wonderful tool for anyone wanting to learn and develop their musical playing skills for guitar, piano and ukulele, especially beginners. As a side note, PLAYER is developed by the same company that developed Jamn, an app that teaches you the musical theory of the relationship between notes, scales and chords.You can read my review of it here. Finally, if you like PLAYER, but want a bit more detail and control of the manipulation of the song you're learing, check out Capo for Mac, which I reviewed here.
