Resources Manual

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Contents

Resources Manual

Where we discuss methods, books, lessons, and websites you use to enhance learning.

Piano Learning Aids

Learning Methods

Piano Teacher

Of course finding a teacher is the best recommendation.

If that is difficult the suggestions that follow are an alternative or supplement.

Music Theory

Many sites already exist that explain theory, Wikipedia is a good reference point.

If you are following a method or school they will likely have a system in place to guide you through the basics and beyond.

School of Synthesia

Apart from the G Major pieces included in the program, it has a growing base of drills contributed by users.

Refer to the forum links, check later in the thread in case there are revised versions.

Books

Beginner

Alfred's MAX Keyboard Complete

Start with basics like how to sit at the keyboard, read music, and play chords. Lessons include blues, rock, classical and folk styles.

Reviews on Amazon, preview it on Google Books

Advanced

Piano Fundamentals

This site is based around a online book written by Chuan C. Chang. It offers an alternative approach to conventional drill and practice methods.

It ties in well with Synthesia as he emphasises separate hand practice and looping difficult sections.

Online Courses

Piano play it

David has an engaging manner, apart from the structured course he has nice tutorials on how to play a range of pop songs.

Video Courses

Learn and Master Piano

The course consists of 14 DVDs, 5 play-along CDs and a 100+ page lesson book. It's a commercial offering.

If you have it user febs has produced a set of midis to help with practice.

Sight Reading

Advanced Scores

At the moment synthesia for intermediate and above sight reading just isn't ready, there are two options on the voting list that will help, Sheet-only Song Display and Sheet Music Image Import.

Learning

This may be possible or it may still be best to use a 3rd party application eg. Jalmus

Suggestions please, it should be entirely possible, based on the wiki entry a good start would be structured practice pieces.

Piano Communities

Places to talk and ask questions about piano generally.

Digital Music

A summary of adding songs can be viewed as:

  1. Search around the Internet for the song.
  2. Check out several versions to see which is best.
  3. Correct any mistakes, trim off excess parts, etc.
  4. Add it to a watched folder, set up rating/difficulty/bookmarks.
  5. Start practising...

Finding New Songs

A nice feature of Synthesia is you can always find new songs to play. Just search or use some of the links below.

If you already found your file and do not know how to load, please refer to the Watched Folders page in the manual to learn how to load your song.

Searching

For finding new songs, the easiest method would be to go to Google and type in the name of the song that you wish to learn, followed by the word, "midi".

For example, the song you wish to find is "Bella's Lullaby", then you search "Bella's Lullaby MIDI" on google. Following that, you click on the various links until you can find one which lets you download the MIDI. In my example, the first link would direct you to a page in which you can just click the MIDI, which lets you download.

In some cases, the website may not have a download link.

For example, I may be searching for Chopin's Etude Opus.25 No.9 in Gb Major "Butterfly Etude" and I found a page but when I click on the link, it directs me to a Midi Player. In this case, I would need to right click the link, and select "Save link as..."

If you find a site asking for money for songs, you can usually just close it and find another site. It's usually very easy to find the MIDI you're looking for and you almost never have to use a for-pay site.

List of sites

Plus more links in this forum thread or the Synthesia Midi club

Converting Sheet Music

Converting Sheet music to Midi is achieved with Score scanning OCR programs

Photoscore works very well but a few alternatives are mentioned in this forum topic.

Photoscore

http://www.neuratron.com/photoscore.htm

PhotoScore 6 is a music scanning program - the musical equivalent of a text OCR program.

What do people use PhotoScore for?

  • Scanning music for use in sequencers or other editing programs; for re-arranging or extracting parts
  • Scanning handwritten music for note entry away from a computer (PhotoScore Ultimate only)
  • Creating MIDI files to put on web pages for others to hear

Review

Note you can also just read in a PDF version of the score

The Photoscore software is actually what Sibelius uses as part of their sheet music scanning package. They have two versions, the MIDI version which is around $24 and the full version that is around $249. The MIDI version does not link up CODAs which was a hassle, you can work around it by editing the endlines of measure to repeat certain sections, by importing the midi back into a notation program to make any edits that are needed.

The scanning software is not perfect. Once you have scanned in the music, you need to do some editing. I hardly ever need to edit notes, but I always need to edit the sustain markings as they don't always get recognised. It's a bit of a learning curve but once you figure out how to work the included editing tools, you can work up a nice piece of sheet music which can be saved as a MIDI that outputs a nice file with a track for the treble clef and a separate one for the bass clef. Works out perfectly for my favorite part of the process..... plopping the file into my Synthesia folder and playing the music. I find having the notes labelled with proper note names (C, Bb, D...etc) and the keys labelled with fingering hints to be an amazing tool for learning new songs.

Notation software

Notation software is a valuable tool to allow you to modify existing Midi's or to create new ones. It can also be used to tweak the results from your OCR program, a common interchange format is MusicXML.

MuseScore

http://musescore.org/

MuseScore is a free cross-platform WYSIWYG music notation program, that offers a cost-effective alternative to professional programs such as Sibelius and Finale. You can print beautifully engraved sheet music or save it as PDF or MIDI file.

Some highlights:

  • WYSIWYG, notes are entered on a "virtual note sheet"
  • Easy and fast note entry with your keyboard, mouse, or MIDI keyboard
  • Import and export of MusicXML and Standard MIDI Files
  • Available for Windows, Mac and Linux

Preparing MIDI files

Well prepared scores using notation software will produce optimised midi files with their file - save as function.

However if you've created a MIDI song in a MIDI authoring program or you found one online some place that isn't exactly optimised for Synthesia? Here's how to make it work best.

Splitting Hands

The track boxes shown in Synthesia are generated automatically by separating every (MIDI) track, channel, and instrument off into its own. Some examples: a MIDI track that keeps switching back and forth between two instruments would be shown as two separate tracks in Synthesia. Similarly, if you were using 4 different channels all in the same track (frequently the case in a type-0 MIDI file), it would be shown as 4 tracks in Synthesia.

You can use this to your advantage if you want to split up your left/right hand piano part. Just split the parts up into separate MIDI tracks or make each part use a different channel. Depending on your MIDI editor one of those will probably be easier than the other. Often you can "cut, make a new track, paste" notes pretty easily.

Quantization

To get melody practice to stop correctly on groups of notes like chords (vs. stopping on each note individually), those notes should be quantized. Virtually every MIDI editor has some built-in quantization support built in that will snap note start and stop times to the nearest quarter, eighth, or sixteenth. In pieces with triplets it can get a little more complicated, say, quantizing smaller sections individually so you have finer control over the method the editor uses.

A nicely quantized piece will go a long way to looking better, reacting correctly in melody practice, and showing better sheet music.

Markers

In Game Options there is an option to import Midi Markers, as an example using CakeWalk you would click "View", and then "Markers" and add the markers.

Technical Stuff

Linux version

There is a third-party port of the game linthesia, but it is quite old and doesn't include all the nice new features in the learning pack.

Wine

Synthesia can be run in wine, setup wine as per your distro, Ubuntu (and mint) can use the wine ppa.

Wine 1.2 is reported to work, more tweaks are needed before it runs with 1.3, but try and let us know if you work it out.

You need to install a daemon (software synthetizer), you have two options

Timidity

See this forum post for Timidity as a daemon

LinuxSampler

See this forum post for LinuxSampler. LinuxSampler is probably the better method but involves compiling code.

Windowed mode

Change the window options with winecfg.

  1. Applications -> Add application (select Synthesia.exe and select new entry "Synthesia.exe")
  2. Graphics -> De-Select "Allow the window manager to decorate the windows" (if selected)
  3. Graphics -> Select "Emulate a virtual desktop" and enter your screen resolution

Bugs

  • The sound on the right hand is missing when a note played with the left starts at the same time, the

missing note is when you are watching both hands, if you watch left and play right it works, so minor overall

  • 'wine SynthesiaConfig.exe' half works,

the top button 'video settings' crashes, so use winecfg, the 'advanced settings' button works fine

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