Hello everyone!

These last weeks have been incredible!

Thank you so much everyone for your support!

Not only have we redesigned the whole website  (I hope you love the new look and feel!), but if you have been reading the blog you may have also noticed that during the last weeks we also had the VIP Pre-Release (we invited only those that had left comments on our blog).

The results have been incredible and people from USA, Canada, Australia , Singapore, Spain, Colombia, Uruguay, and even the United Arab Emirates have joined us!

The feedback we have been getting from our first students makes e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g—all these years, all the effort, all the time spent—worthwhile.

Thanks—REALLY thanks—everyone for your support! This is really a dream come true for us, especially because of the feedback we have received from our students.

I do not know any of our students personally; however, I was fortunate enough to meet most of our students through email and through our piano community. I wanted to share with you some of the comments we have received. Thank you Ana, Oscar, and Franc for your permission to post these comments!:

"HI Rod,
This is the best product I have seen online. You have taken music making to a whole new level never done before online. I strongly recommend this product to everyone who has just begun learning or has been learning for a few years. They will suddenly begin to understand what they are playing.
Congrats Rod to yourself and your team.

Oscar Dsouza”

Oscar shared with me that he was a beginner piano student from Dubai and that to make his piano learning faster he had bought many online piano courses from different sources in the past. Therefore, I was especially delighted to read his comment. Thank you Oscar!

"I just opened the door, many more friends will enter, I'm amazed about how easy is the software I received and also I liked colors and design very straight to the point and not boring at all !!!

Believe-me I know a lot of other ideas for piano online learning and I risked some money on dozens of ideas, but I can make you sure that now I’m feeling on the top wave!

Franc Bruno"

I received that comment from Franc a few days after he bought the course. Several weeks later I contacted him again and asked him if I could post his comment on our site. To my pleasant surprise, he answered:

“Rod

You can use my testimonial. It's my pleasure.

And I add that the track you used to open the book is amazing, very calm and relaxing inviting the student to seat and play.

I'm amazed about the content and quality of logic behind music.

I can say that for the first time in years buying learning software I'm 100% satisfied with my investment.

Thank you
you can use also this comment. “

Thank you Franc!!!

I also had the fortune of meeting another of our students: Ana. She first got my attention when months ago I read the comment she had posted on our blog, about our Music Fundamentals eBook. There, she mentioned that her own mother was a piano teacher:

“Just finished first lesson. My mother (who is a piano teacher) wasn’t able to teach me this much in past oh, god knows how many years with her conventional approach (sorry, Mom). I’ll definitely show her this website. Can’t wait to start a second lesson. Thanks for doing this,guys

Ana Federenko”

A few weeks later, after our course was ready, we sent the invitations to only those who had posted comments on our blog, and of course she was included in the list. I sent her an email with the invitation to become part of the VIP Pre-Release, and she joined us and bought the course. I had the pleasure of meeting her. I was very intrigued by her personal story, and after I sent her a message, she kindly shared it with me:

"Hi Rod,

“My Mom has been a piano teacher for the past 30 or 35 years.

Unfortunately for me, she is an "old school." You know very well what I mean by that. So this combination never really worked since I, as a kid, was naturally opposed to any kind of meaningless memorization. My mom, God bless her, thought that I would do better with another teacher and another instrument. Well, that just doesn't work like that, does it. The underlying frustration was always there. However, my passion for music never died and luckily I found your course which gave me new hope.

“It's been couple of days now and I enjoy it immensely. I loved, for instance, how you offer to think in terms of intervals. I totally got it. It was a great feeling to discover a hidden (for me personally) gem like that. ... All I want to do now is practice on the piano and on my guitar, since I can apply my new knowledge there too.
”

When I read this comment, you cannot imagine how moved I was. I asked Ana´s permission and then showed the message to all of our team.

Then, about one week later, I was surprised to receive another comment from Ana on my profile wall at The Piano Encyclopedia´s Community (all students are able to meet other students and our team members on the community). There she wrote:

“Hi Rod,
I'm excited because I just made my very first short composition! It's sounded great! It was in C major. I can't wait to learn more. Thanks so much!”

You cannot imagine what a deep impact this short message had on me.

I had to struggle for many years with teachers who would only teach me how to memorize music pieces or read music sheet I had many years of frustration. There were years of only learning new pieces to then forget them, full of frustration, without any real progress. For me, it was not until after 10 years since I started piano that I was able to learn how to improvise or compose my own pieces. Ana had written me this comment just about a week after buying the course, so I was really moved and extremely happy for her.

In order to fully understand this, you have to understand that The Piano Encyclopedia was primarily born out of my own frustration, my own story. I spent nearly ten years quitting lessons, switching teachers and starting again and again, until I found a teacher who was able to teach me music in the right way. After this, I no longer had to spend months studying a single piece. I discovered how to play the piano with freedom, being able to sit on the piano and freely improvise, create my own music and express my own feelings, and not just how to play a specific piece. Then, I realized that I was not alone, that many pianists around the world were suffering from the same cause and that the majority had no clue about how to improvise or play the piano without depending on music sheet or memorization.

Reading all the students´ comments (I will be sharing more comments soon), made me realize that all the efforts we had invested during the last three years, that all the time that the more than fifty contributors have put in —musicians, pianists, writers, editors, graphics designers, and developers— and that all the time invested in this project was more than worthwhile.

It especially made me realize that changing the way people learn piano is possible.

This is why we call The Piano Encyclopedia “the revolution to the conventional piano learning method” — a method not based on rules or memorization— but on logic and understanding. It is a method for those who want to understand “the big picture” of how music works in a practical way and who want to learn how to play the piano with freedom.

After reading all the comments from our students, for me this is a dream come true, and it makes everything worthwhile giving us all the energy to strive for greater things. (For us it is an evolving project—we are already at version v1.3 and all our students are getting free updates!)

Again, thank you Ana, Franc, and Oscar for permitting me to share these comments!

TODAY, we are starting the Official Pre-Release and we will be sending special invitations to ALL of those who have subscribed to our newsletter, so you can be the first to enjoy our course and at a special Pre-Release price for members-only.

All those invited will receive a password that you will be able to use to enter the Pre-Release page and access our course before anyone else, at a special Pre-Release price for members-only that will be available for a limited time only. Also you will be able to watch the sneak-peek 6-minute video tour— before it even becomes public—that will show you some of the exciting features of The Logic Behind Music.

To enter the Exclusive Pre-Release page, go to the following link and enter the password provided in the invitation email:

Feel free to write me or leave a comment here and stay in touch!

I really look forward to getting to meet each of you!

Enjoy!

Rod Schejtman

Hi everybody!

I have really good news to share with you!

The Piano Encyclopedia’s Main Lessons are almost finished, and even though we are taking a little longer, the great news is that we have expanded our lessons with new sections, more images, interactive animations, and even more sound recordings. We have also added some new very special practical chapters that we’re calling the “Real World Practical Chapters”. I’ll tell you more about that in a moment- but first let me tell you why…

We’re really grateful to have received many wonderful emails and comments to our blog about our Music Fundamentals eBook, that we gave away for free, and I am personally very grateful for all your words of support and encouragement. (You can read some very interesting comments here). In this way, we have all been greatly inspired and we have focused on developing and expanding the Piano Encyclopedia’s Main Lessons during the last two months. They are almost ready and we’re finishing some new sections so as to include everything necessary for mastering composing and improvising - step-by-step - from beginning to advanced. Thus, we’ll be releasing the Piano Encyclopedia’s Main Lessons before we release the rest. The good news is that we’re almost done and that they are looking absolutely great!

We have been planning the content of these lessons for months and months, and to now see them almost finished is something completely delightful and exciting for me and the rest of the team! But better yet, the great news is that we have also expanded our team, which is not only helping us to develop faster but also to enrich our content in ways we couldn’t before. We were lucky to find some very talented musicians, writers, and editors that share our vision. Some are professional concert pianists or piano teachers; while others are editors and writers, but that in addition, are also amateur musicians that share a deep passion for music.

We have incorporated into the team both classically-trained musicians, as well as jazz, blues, and modern-style music lovers. Some of them find their way in life giving classical concerts in orchestras with all the joy Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and other great composers provide. Others have devoted their life to the jazz and blues, playing for clubs, jazz events, and improvising music for the wine-drinking crowds. Even though most of the music they play and love is separated up to four centuries apart, they all have one thing in common - that they all share our vision of changing piano learning.

I am really amazed of how many experienced musicians share similar stories to the ones I told you about in our Music Fundamentals eBook. Stories about how many of them have also spent years of frustration, until they discovered some very simple but powerful concepts that changed their musical lives forever, opening their path into really understanding music, composing, and improvising. Concepts that sometimes are just not taught in traditional piano lessons.

• Why don’t most traditional piano methods teach this?
• Why aren’t these concepts taught right at the beginning?
• Why isn’t music theory taught in a practical way?
• Why only very few piano teachers know how to apply all this and most of them just focus on ‘piano playing’ instead of understanding how really music works?
• Why, why, why….?

Actually, teachers that know all these are so hard to find, and you actually have to consider yourself lucky if you have found a teacher that has told you that scales are not just for ‘improving playing technique’ or ‘practicing your fingers’. As for myself -I had to spend more than ten years until I found a teacher that actually told me that scales were useful for determining the harmony of a song, and that they were the key to improvising and composing- and that scales were not just for ‘stretching your fingers’.

Evermore -truth be told- I used to hate scales and I am sure many students do. My teacher, at that time, would tell me that I had to practice the scales so I could improve my playing skills; and although that’s true, I found it more useful to practice real music passages, and so I found it completely useless. However now I definitely love them, and I practice even the exotic types in addition to the common scales (Spanish, Chinese, Arabian scales, etc.). Why? How come I changed from hating them to loving? The fact is no one had explained how to really use them… Nowadays, scales are my pathway in to playing different music styles, as just by knowing the notes and how a scale is harmonized, it’s very easy to figure out what chords to play along and how to improvise a melody. Why don’t they teach these key concepts right at the beginning?

Some music secrets:

• Knowing which key your new tune is, means that you should be able to figure out which chords to play with your left hand (the harmonization of the scale will give you the chords that you can use to play along with).
• Once you know which chords to play, you'll be able to know which notes you can use to embellish your current melody (the relation of scales to chords -and vice versa- will tell you which notes you can play on your right hand, with every chord you play on your left hand).

• Mastering music intervals, not only will permit you to predict how chords sound even before you play them; but you’ll also be able to create new chord types by just combining the different intervals, just as if you were combining spices (intervals) for cooking a tasty meal (chords) (music intervals as the elemental building blocks of music).

• Understanding that music can be summarized into the concept of tension-and-release, and how this works with chords and scales, can open your doors into building chord progressions, and creating ‘musical-phrases’.

• Music is like a language: the notes of the scale are your alphabet, chords are your words, and chord progressions are your sentences or ‘musical phrases’. Combining sentences can help you build paragraphs, and by combining ‘musical phrases’ you can start creating your simple songs.

• Finding the balance between Tension and Release is the secret to how all the music works (relation of that concept with chords, scales, and intervals).

You might want to read each of the previous sentences again and little by little, as I have just described some simple and powerful secrets, that when mastered, I assure you that they will change your music abilities dramatically, as they have done for me. I would have saved so many years of endless frustration had I learned all those concepts fourteen years ago! I have already shared with you some of the basic concepts that helped me really rediscover music in our Music Fundamentals eBook that we recently gave away for free. (In fact, if you didn’t get your copy yet, you might want to grab your free copy here).

However, in the Piano Encyclopedia’s Main Lessons not only will I be telling you in depth all these simple but powerful concepts that made me reach a new level of piano playing (and made me discover that composing and improvising was not just possible but also a very easy thing to do), but in addition, you’ll also get to enjoy all the secrets that made each of our team’s musicians reach a new music level- step-by-step.

So whether you like classical, jazz, blues, or any other style, my goal is for you to understand how music works for ANY music style. My objective is to show you through these lessons how these simple but powerful music concepts work for explaining the harmonic structure of any music style. This is why we thought it was important to expand our lessons and our team, and also incorporate musicians who share the best of both worlds (classical and modern styles) so as to show you how music really works in the different fields.

However, by now you might be wondering, “What are the Real World Practical Chapters?” Well, just to give you a sneak peek, I am going to show you in a minute all the different music-style examples that have been ALREADY included in our new Real World Practical Chapters.

Why Real World Practical Chapters? The reason is because even though our lessons already include many examples with chord progressions and harmonization samples, in these new chapters, we’re including song excerpts from REAL songs to show you how the theory really fits into practice – using songs and music pieces from real artists and composers, not just some textbook examples. The purpose of these chapters is to show you how you can compose and improvise real music by mastering the concepts we are showing you. All the harmony of the songs and music pieces we’ll show you can be explained by using the practical tips and simple concepts we teach you. By showing you music from the different music styles we can show you how all music works with same harmonic principles.

I could tell you more about it, but I think it’s better if you take a look at all the musical styles that have been already included in our Real World Practical Chapters:

Musical Styles already included in the Real-World Practical Chapters:

• Pop
• Rock
• Jazz
• Country
• Folk
• Soul
• Gospel
• Bossa-Nova
• Rock & Roll
• Blues
• Major Blues
• Minor Blues
• Boogie-Woogie
• Rock Ballad
• Rag-time
• Swing
• Classical

Currently, the Practical Chapters include the harmonic analysis of at least one song or music piece from each of the above music styles.

In this way we hope to guide you through the classic songs that defined each music style, and hopefully walk you through your favorite songs. However, once you understand the fundamentals, you’ll be able to understand how the harmony works for any song.

Now before I go on, let me give you a preview of all the excerpts from songs and music pieces we have already included in our Real World Practical Chapters:

Some songs and music pieces we have already included in our Real-Word Practical Chapters:

“Hey Jude” (The Beatles ), “She loves you” (The Beatles), “Paperback Writer” (The Beatles), “Yellow Submarine” (The Beatles), “Let it be” (The Beatles), “Maybe, I’m Amazed” (Paul McCartney), “Mac the Knife” (Brecht, Weill), “Johnny B. Goode” (Chuck Berry) , “Midnight Hour” (Wilson Pickett ), “Glory Days “ (Bruce Springsteen), “Old Time Rock & Roll” (Bob Seger ), “Maggie May“ (Rod Stewart and Melissa Etheridge), “Have I Told You Lately” (Rod Stewart and Van Morrison), “Different Drum” (Stone Poneys), “Every Time You Go Away” (Paul Young), “Empty Red Blues” (Bessie Smith), Sweet Home Chicago (written by Robert Johnson and recorded by The Blues Brothers), “The Twist” (Chubby Checker), “Hound Dog” (Elvis Presley), “Take It Easy” (The Eagles), “All Along the Watchtower” (Jimi Hendrix), “Stairway to Heaven” (Led Zeppelin), “Oye Como Va” (Santana), “Black Magic Woman” (Santana), “Hotel California” (The Eagles), “Night and Day” (Frank Sinatra), "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin), “Für Elise” (Ludwig van Beethoven) … and many more!

So, as you can see, we’ll guide you through each of the musical styles and show you some real examples of how the theory fits into practice. The good news is that we’re almost done. We’re polishing up the graphics, preparing the animations and sound recordings, and making sure everything is looking great!

Stay tuned and we’ll be back with more news; with more free stuff and previews along the way.

In the name of the whole team,

Thank you for following The Piano Encyclopedia’s development,

Best wishes and Happy Holidays!

Rod

P.S: You may want to read some very interesting comments about our Music Fundamentals e-Book here: Check out what everyone else is saying. If you have finished reading it, feel free to leave a comment, join the conversation, and let me and everyone else know what you think.

P.S.S: ..And if you didn’t get your copy of our Music Fundamentals e-Book yet, you may do so by signing up here: Reserve our Music Fundamentals eBook. Once you subscribe you’ll instantly receive a copy of our e-Book and we’ll keep you up to date with the development news, with more free stuff and previews along the way. Let me warn you that as for today, this eBook is free only for our followers, so I don’t for how long we’ll keep giving it away for free.