Category: Novice

Rock Band 3 will revolutionize piano teaching

I’m guessing this keyboard is basically like an Oxygen or a Korg K25. Remember this?

It was a massive flop. Basically because it taught piano in the traditional context. Repeat after me. Play this scale. Learn this traditional melody. Learn how to read the notes and so forth.

Rock Band ditches all of this and gets to the real issue at hand (for the majority of people): play this song. The catch is that something like guitar or drums is pretty complex to visualize in a reaction-based game. Imagine tablature flying down those five ramps and you can see why they simplified the guitar.

The vocal visualization for Rock Band is a little better, in that it is basically a MIDI grid notation view of the melody. There isn’t much detail; just enough to get the gist of the melody, but it still is a more accurate model than the flying dots.

The flying dots are great by the way. I’ve seen many non-musicians play some seriously hard stuff using the flying dots – it’s a game, but it’s a skill too. Now Harmonix has decided to apply the popular flying dots model to a 25-key keyboard. Why is this earth shattering? Because for the first time, this game-y model of performance is actually being done on an honest-to-goodness instrument. Something where after playing some rounds of the game you could go up to a real piano and play, and it would sound like what you just did in the game. This isn’t just a cool idea for a game, this is the future of music education.

Think of all the tricks and traps and gimmicks music educators have tried over the years to get kids to learn piano. Much of that will be obsolete when this game comes out. Of course, I’m not talking about the long stretches of piano lessons that end in recital performance. I’m talking about the group and class piano methods that aim to teach masses of kids a modicum of basic piano skills. This game basically solves that old problem of “how do I get these kids to get over their fear of piano?”

In my classes, I tend to steer away from heavy piano playing, and address piano as more of a means to an end – an input device among many others for getting your musical ideas to become a reality. I may want to incorporate this game though, as this is the first game that *is* going to be popular, and *is* going to end up actually teaching a skill.

Be prepared, music teachers. Big changes are coming, and they’re coming faster than they ever have before.

iPad music apps: Korg iElectribe

Hello faithful readers who have saved willkuhn.com on your RSS feed reader. I am back. I have come down from the mountaintop, and in my hand I hold an amazing tablet. But let’s skip all the magic and head right over to the music apps.

For my first look at an iPad music app I’ll take a look at Korg’s iElectribe drum machine, a faithful recreation of their Electribe drum machine of not-so-many years past.


So we have the standard 16 switches for timing, eight sound bank slots, a “transport” area, and a pretty sophisticated effects area.

The “browser” button takes you to the preset sound banks, which do not appear to be editable, and also shows you the preloaded beats, which are of course editable. I wish that Korg would have make the INIT patches a little more accessible than throwing them down all the way at the bottom of this list, but at least there are many blank slots to mess with.

What sets this drum machine apart from many other iPhone/iPad 808-alikes is its ability to record knob turns in realtime. Simply hit the record button, and along with saving all of your pad triggers (and doing some auto-quantizing magic) it will auto-record every knob you turn in the effect section as well. This has its pros and cons, however, as it can be frustrating to think you’re changing the effect, only to have it change back on the next loop through. Once you realize what’s happening, it’s easy to fix, but the effect can be a bit jarring.

The last problem with this app is its inability to export the great sounding drum loops it creates. There is simply no way to get a wav or aiff or anything out of this app outside of hooking it to a line-in jack on something else, which kind of devalues the possibility of using the iPad as a standalone music making device. I’d love to dream up some loops in iElectribe and then export them to Looptastic (more on Looptastic later).

EDIT: a new version of iElectribe allows loop and performance exporting via iTunes file sharing. Woo hoo!

Try it out for yourself on the App Store: Korg iElectribe ($9.99)