Playground Sessions will Make you a Piano Hero
And thank the gods that there won’t be any crappy plastic controllers necessary either.
Playground Sessions is a new piano education application created by Chris Vance and Quincy Jones to make learning piano more fun. The program utilizes a “play to learn” model that relies on today’s most popular music to get students interested in playing and subsequently learning as well.
The piano lessons come in the form of a sheet music library for the current set of 90 pop songs and half of them include instructional videos in addition to some backing tracks for musical accompaniment. Playground Sessions also has a “Bootcamp Library” for teaching music theory skills like musical notations, ear training, and rhythm training for students.
The gamification comes inspired by Guitar Hero by providing instant feedback for each key press and a final total score for the full song. Playground Sessions will track student scores over-time to measure improvements. Global leaderboards and badges are also present to encourage students to tackle additional challenges and compete with more skill.
According to Mashable, Quincy Jones’ involvement included a minor stake in the company and ensuring the development team is making Playground Sessions fun enough to make sure people will actually use it. Jones stated that “Playground Sessions is the ultimate technology to bring music to people of all ages who have the passion to learn it.”
This ultimate technology does come with a price though. In lieu of a plastic crappy controller, you will have to invest in a keyboard with computer connectivity. Playground Sessions has subscription-based pricing plans by the month or year and a la carte plans for individual songs as well.
Learning musical instruments has always been personally difficult for me and the general musical instrument learning population is decreasing as music programs get cut in schools and shortcuts to making music with things like guitar tablature and software become increasingly prevalent.
Guitar Hero and other rhythm games may have already been dead for years now but Playground Sessions is attempting to bring it back with real-life benefits attached to it.
I welcome the new fad.
This is pretty awesome; I’ve long forgotten how to play piano since my teacher told me I “wasn’t allowed” to play the jazz licks he’d tease me with at the end of our sessions. Take that, Bob!
Aren’t big fun of piano but will try just to check it out! 🙂
Sounds fab.
There’s a similar thing on playstation for guitar. The game that ‘makes you eat your vegetables’
http://rocksmith.ubi.com/rocksmith/en-us/home/index.aspx
I would like this but for guitar 🙂
Including at least one piece I selected in my weekly lessons was a big part of why I stuck with it. Focus here is on the player, literally. No player path, no stream of revenue.