Happy 2008!!!

We wanted to thank everyone that supported us until now- and in the name of the whole team- wish you a wonderful New Year with lots of Piano learning!

And here’s some great news for you: these last two months have been of intense amounts of work with lots of progress and new features!

You’re going to love this:
We’ve expanded our database to cover all the most used chords, scales, intervals, and harmonies throughout the Whole World!

Believe it or not, you’ll now be able to explore all the chords, scales, and harmonies used for all the Western and Eastern Music.

Think about it, you’ll be able to master all the music styles of your choice: Jazz, Blues, Rock, Pop, Classical, Flamenco, Spanish, Chinese, Jewish, Indian, Arabic, and the list goes on! And we don’t stop there, you’ll get to explore all the exotic chords and scales you can think of -and we’ll keep adding content with our constant updates.

But before I jump into details, let me say this: not only you’ll be able to learn what scales or chords do music styles have in common, but you’ll be able also to compose or improvise any melody -on any music style you like- by using the Harmony Dictionary.

Believe me, you’ll just need to choose a music style from a list, and the Harmony Dictionary will show you what chords to play, and what notes you should play in your melody lines during each of those chords, so that your composition or improvisation sounds like that music style you just love- call it Jazz, blues, Classical Indian music, Western Classical Music, or a Rock music piece. Not only you’ll be able to look at all the keyboard diagrams and listen to those harmonies and chord progressions, but you’ll also be able to print them in a practical print-friendly format so that you can practice them at your piano.

Most important of all, the lessons will teach you *how to* harmonize any scale, and all the music theory concepts behind it.

But, that’s only half of the story… for each scale or chord entry, you’ll be able to explore all the different used equivalent names, their history and origin. For example did you know that the Major Scale is also called “Ionian” Scale (as known by the Church Modes) or that in Indian Classical Music the Major Scale is also used, but by the name of “Mela Dhirasankarabharana, or even that in Ethiopian Music this common scale is called “A Raray”? Stated a little differently, this means that no matter your musical background, you’ll be able to find any chord and scale you want, using any of the different culture’s names. And you’ll enjoy yourself when you’ll discover that *that* scale you didn’t know, was just the same as one of the scales you already knew but with a different name. For example, did you know that the famous “Jazz Minor” Scale is just a different name for the Melodic Minor Ascending Scale?

More important than that, for each entry we have included practical tips from expert composers and musicians, which will tell you *how* to combine those chords and scales to make professional compositions -according to each music style.

If you’re an experienced piano player, or if you frequent music stores you must have noted those Chord and Scale dictionaries, each having in the cover a different musical style: “Jazz Chord Dictionary”, “Blues Chord Dictionary”, or even “Rock Chord Dictionary”. Sadly, if you look at the index of any two of those books, you’ll discover that they share about 80% (!) of the same content, even thought they are two separate books! Can this be true? Well this should be no surprise for advanced musicians, as of course, all music styles are related, but it really is a big surprise for the firm that receives the triple amount of money and the victim that has bought the three books with 80% repeated content. Well forget all about that, as with The Piano Encyclopedia you’ll get a concise learning experience that will let you explore all musical styles: you’ll be able to explore Jazz’s, Blues’, Rock’s, Indian’s, Jewish’s, Chinese’s (or whatever to other style you like) Chord, Scale, and Harmony dictionaries with just a mouse click, and learn what do all have in common!

Make no mistake, this is the first time a Chord Dictionary, Scale Dictionary, Interval Dictionary, and Harmony Dictionary, are combined into just one product -and interactively explaining the relationships between each of these components. One thing I want to stress, is that 90% of pianists do not know that there exists an intrinsic relationship between chords and scales, intervals and chords, and scales and harmonies. Seriously, put some thought into this, with The Piano Encyclopedia you’ll learn all these music components at once, their relationship, and how to use them to play professionally, learn composition and improvisation.

Oh Wait! I almost forgot! There’s even more new stuff, we just finished developing a Chord, Interval, and Scale Finder. Yes, you read that right, different from many others, it’s a Chord, Interval, and Scale Finder- all together! That means that you’ll be able to input the notes and the The Piano Encyclopedia Finder will tell you if you’re playing an interval, a chord, or a scale, and all the information you need to know about it. Even if the notes are not part of our database, the finder will analyze the chord or scale throughout a structural and harmonical analysis. You think I’m lying, don’t you? No… we have really incorporated intelligent algorithms that will analyze any chords or scales you input, as well as a professional musician would do.

I’m not kidding, this means that -for example- you’ll be able to view all the inversions and voicing of even an unknown chord, explore it’s musical structure and it’s relation with musical intervals, and even learn how to combine it harmonically with other existent chords to create new chord progressions -by just entering a chord in your computer! Imagine using this tool for your own compositions…

So let me summarize and review; the current developed features are:

• Intervals -> every interval explained, as well as their relation with chords and scales.
• Scales -> about every scale on the planet and in every root
• Chords -> all standard chords and even all of the strange and exotic chords, full of expert’s tips for composing and improvising.
• Harmony -> the harmonization of every existent scales, categorized by musical style
• Compose & Improvise-> all chords that can be used with a certain scale, typical chord progressions, and chord substitutions.
• Interval, Chord & Scale Finder -> if you don’t know what you are playing, simply let the finder help you. Just input the notes and finder tells you what scale, chord, or interval you are playing.
• And Much More…

By now, you’re probably wondering if this will work for you…
It turns out that this learning experience has been designed both for people that know only piano basics as well as for intermediate and advanced piano players. You’ll be able to decide on what topics to learn, what scales and harmonies to explore, and their level of difficulty, as the experience will take you from the very basics up to mastering professionals levels.

I know you’re probably skeptical. Right? You want to see how it works right now?!

Be one of the first to try The Piano Encyclopedia, subscribe to our newsletter and we’ll send you an invitation *as soon* as the beta version is launched!

To stay in tune with the latest updates, check out the community room,
we’re always looking for contributors and welcome new suggestions,
so feel free to leave messages and tell us more about you.

Cheers!

Rod

P.S: Just as a quick refresher, you didn’t happen to miss The Preview?

BE ONE OF THE FIRST TO TRY IT OUT

See for yourself: Sign-Up to our Mailing List Today
and we’ll send you an invitation as soon as it’s ready!

We’re proud to announce our first public appearance on YouTube!!!

A team of highly-inspired musicians and software developers wants You to experience a revolutionary piano learning method:

The Piano Encyclopedia - the first practical piano encyclopedia in the world.

You will enjoy more than 700 pages of unique content, 2500 piano recordings, and 2400 interactive illustrations of piano keyboards showing how to master scales, chords, intervals, keyboard playing, improvising, and composing!

WELCOME to this new experience!

I’m Rod, the founder of Forgotten Dreams Corp. and the manager of The Piano Encyclopedia development, and I want to invite YOU to be one of the first to try out this revolutionary piano-learning method.

The first people that sign-up to our mailing list will be given the possibility of becoming one of the first to try out The Piano Encyclopedia.

We’ll be releasing a LIMITED number of invitations!

Sign-up to our mailing list today!

The whole team is very excited about this release, so feel free to give us any feedback on the new features we’ve developed and asking us any questions you might have! You can leave comments on our community chat room or comment in one of our posts.

Cheers!

Rod

Hi again!

Let me tell you more about the new features we developed for you:

You might wonder… well the Piano Encyclopedia has more than 700 pages of unique content, how am I ever going to learn all that?! We have though about this and we made it as SIMPLE as ever. You’ll be able to learn all the material in very short time. How?!

Well, the Piano Encyclopedia was developed under a systemic approach as we want you to easily understand how everything works and give you the harmony secrets unveiled so that you can:

• • Learn how to play ANY chord by just knowing the basic intervals. Master all the 7th, 9th, 11th, and 13th chords!
  • In this approach, not only you’ll be able to play any chord you see on a song, but you’ll be able to create your own new chords and be able to predict if they will sound dissonant or consonant before even playing them, by just analyzing the intervals.
  • Forget about counting tones and semitones and memorizing how many notes you should skip, once you know the basic music intervals, you’ll be able to play chords and scales in no time!!!
  • You’ll have the most complete reference material available worldwide for piano playing, improvising, and composing, with hundreds of illustrated, animations, and piano sound recordings!

The intervals approach to learning music is so important to us that we developed some tools to make your piano learning easier!

• Chord Musical Structure Analyzer
  • For every chord contained in the encyclopedia you’ll be able to view it’s structure decomposed in the different music intervals! For example, if you click on D minor chord ’s musical-structure icon you would see an illustration of the intervals that compose this chord: a Perfect fifth and a minor third. This way you will know that in order to play ANY minor chord you will just need to find the perfect fifth and minor third above the root. See? No memorizing of tones and semitones is needed once you know intervals! And this approach will help you later in understanding harmonic analysis in our Harmony Guide, included in The Piano Encyclopedia.
  • Once you know all the basic three note chords and the basic intervals, you’re ready for all the rest of them! So if you decide to view the musical structure of a A 9 Chord, then you’ll be shown an illustration of the Major Triad+ 7 interval + 9 interval. You’ll see it graphically, with keyboard illustrations, so you’ll never forget it, and you’ll be playing different types of chords in ALL tonalities in no time!
  • The best part is: the keyboard illustrations are not just static images. EVERY illustration throughout the whole the Encyclopedia is interactive and you’ll be able to listen to it’s sound, or even go the musical structure of the chord or scale you are viewing, with just a click!
  • This means that you’ll be able to play the sound of each interval that composes your chord under analysis, and then compare them with the sound of the chord itself. So if you are analyzing a C7 chord with The Piano Encyclopedia, you’ll realize that the 7th interval is the one that gives the most tension to the chord and makes it more dissonant, by just listening to the different sounds.
• Scale Musical Structure Analyzer
  • Yes! Same as with the chord analyzer, you’ll get to analyze scales and decompose them in the intervals that they form. For once, you will learn the difference between all the minor common scales with a systemic approach (the minor natural, the harmonic minor, and the jazz minor, etc). Not only you’ll be able to analyze the common scales, , but EVERY existent scale on piano playing, jazz scales, blue scales, major church modes, minor modes, all of them!
  • Using the same systemic approach as chords, the knowledge learned in chords will help you to learn all the common scales necessary for composing and improvising at the piano. For example, did you know that if you play a Maj7 Chord with 9th, 11th, and 13th you get a Major scale?! Yes! play the Maj7 chord: C E G B and now play the 9th, 11th, and 13th tensions, D F G. If you play this in open form you’ll get a very nice sounding chord, while in closed form you get the major scale . Nobody told you that before?!
  • Well yes! Chord and scales are closely related, the key is knowing the intervals, and this will let you learn much faster than before and make important progress in less time!
  • More importantly, let me tell you one of the most important music *secrets*, all chords have related scales, and you can use this related scales, to improvise your melody in. To know what scale you should use, you just have to play the chord with all it’s tensions (7th, 9th, 11th, 13th) and then play the same notes in closed form: you’ll get a scale! All the chords that harmonize the C major scale, form the C major scale when played in closed form with all its tensions (with the only difference that the scale is produced in a different order, not starting in C ). You’ll discover all this inside this great interactive Encyclopedia and for once you’ll understand the use of mode scales in piano playing, and how they play an important role in composing and improvising.

• Inversions & Voicings
  
  • Looking for that professional sound that you think only experienced piano players can produce!?
  • You’ll be able to click on any chord you like and view ALL it’s inversions, and listen to their sound!
  • Do you know voicings?! Do you know the result they can produce on your overall performance? Voicings means just to play a chord different than closed form, for example shifting the second note every note chord you play, an octave higher. Counting from the right, this voicing is called Drop 2 and is used by professional Jazz players, and in block chord harmonization. This simple trick can change your sound quality, try it and tell me your results!
  • If you want to achieve a professional sound, this is the way to go, and you’ll be able to listen and view all the most used voicings used in classical, jazz, blues, chorales, and orchestra music and compare them! (closed, open, Drop 2, Drop 2&4, Skip 2, Skip 2&4, and more voicings!)
• It’s not only an Encyclopedia… it’s so much more!!!
  • The Piano Encyclopedia is a community! Yes! If you are connected to the internet while using The Piano Encyclopedia, you can optionally use the community features we provide. The encyclopedia has an integrated sticky online chat where you can leave questions that can be answered by the whole piano community. Not only you’ll be able to communicate with all the users using the software, but also with all the visitors that do not own the software and come to join our new chat room. The messages do not get erased and stay for days, so that you might leave questions for other members of the community to answer. You’ll get access to our blog directly from The Piano Encyclopedia too and to special pages where you’ll be able to suggest features and join development discussions of new features! We expect to continually developing new and better features based on user’s feedback.
  • As a user of the Piano Encyclopedia you’ll also be able to suggest new chords and scales to add them to our existent database, so that we post software updates! In this way we compromise to build the most complete reference material existent!!!
  • The idea of integrating online material in the Piano Encyclopedia (internet connection will not be required, but if you’re connected, all these features will be enabled) is so that we can include also video lessons and many more multimedia examples where everyone can comment and form discussions about the different learning topics. In this way you won’t get a static encyclopedia, but a dynamic way of learning where you’ll be able to learn about other people’s questions and see if they had the same difficulties as you did.
    


I hope you enjoyed all these new features!

SOON We are going to provide a LIMITED NUMBER of INVITATIONS for the special beta test release.

SO if you want to be the FIRST to try The Piano Encyclopedia, remember to SUBSCRIBE to our blog by email!

We’ll be sending the invitations to a LIMITED number of users.

Cheers!
Rod

Hello everyone!!!

A long time has passed since our previous post and we have SO many new things to tell you!!!

It has been a month of hard work and lots of excellent improvements and new features!!!

We’re so excited with the new results that I don’t know where to start!

We have more than doubled the content of our Encyclopedia!!!!

1. • 350 700 pages of unique-content about everything you wanted to know about keyboard playing, composing, and improvising on the piano.
   • 300 2400!!! full-color illustrations of piano keyboards picturing chord, scales, intervals, and how to harmonize any existing scale!
2. The Piano Encyclopedia now has SOUND. Yes!!! You can now listen to more than 2500 piano recordings and listen to any chord, interval, or scale.
   • You can listen to any chord played in block, arpeggio, or just listen to it note-by-note!
   • Listen to any scales in ascending or descending form, and understand for once why the minor scale has two different forms depending if played up or down.
   • Harmonize scales and try your own chord progressions and listen them right on your computer.
3. Yes! You’ll now be able to harmonize any scale (major, minor, arabic, jazz scales, everything you ever wanted will be at your reach with just a click) and The Piano Encyclopedia will tell you what chords you should play for each given note of the scale.
   • This all sounds wonderful, but the best part is that apart from being shown what chords to play, YOU will learn how to harmonize any scale you ever want!

The technique is easy and it’s something that has changed completely my approach to piano playing. After I learned this a whole new path was opened for me, and I began understanding how to improvise and how to compose on the piano. You will begin too to understand music for real, not only being able to compose and improvise, but to also understand WHY songs you like sound well. And I am not talking about only popular songs… classical pieces, rock, any style, once you understand music you’ll learn that all styles, no matter what you play, have a common structure in common.

The practical study of harmony will open your eyes, and lead you to paths you never thought you were going to reach. And I am not writing this just to interest you, this is what was my path in learning piano, with years of playing pieces without knowing all this until I discovered this wonderful knowledge that changed everything. I am now able to compose, improvise, and even understand better the pieces I play from other composers. Now even when I play Chopin waltzes or Sting’s song I can see the harmony behind, and understand why certain passages sound that well.

I assure you that once you get to understand something as simple as how to harmonize scales, your whole piano playing perspective will change!

In the next post I’ll tell you about all the other features our team has developed!!!

Please give us feedback and tell us if you like them. Your feedback is the most important thing to us, as it enables us to create developments based on the piano community’s needs, and our goal is to teach music, composing, and improvising at the piano, with the most efficient, practical, and easiest approach.

Cheers!

Rod

Hi there!

I am happy to tell you that we have our first poll ready for YOU to decide what is going to be the first FREE software release!

Please tell us by voting on the poll on the right side panel.

We want your comments and opinions!

We listen to YOU!

Yes! Our team wants to develop great creations just for you, so we need all your feedback.

Here at The Piano Encyclopedia we plan to release many free products that are useful for intermediate and advanced piano players, or even those who are just starting and want to learn faster and efficiently.

Say no to hours and hours of practicing and no progress. You need tools and we plan to provide you with them, so that you can make great achievements in less time.

Would you be interested in learning chords? Never found out what scales were useful for? Or would you need some help on composing and improvising and would love to learn about harmony? Did know that intervals are the primary structure of chords, scales, and … music?

Let me tell you in more detail what we plan to cover in our future releases, so that you can tell us what you wish to try first:

Chord Dictionary

• Contains chord and families of chords displayed graphically with keyboard illustrations and colored keys, ordered chromatically in order to learn them and memorize them easily, as well as in circle of fifths (useful for modulation purposes- aka changing from one scale to another).
• All chords are accompanied by a description of their structure, a useful tip about their functionality and how they are used in compositions, as well as all the names and synonyms for that chord including popular, jazz, and blues standards.

Hi there!

Welcome! My name is Rod and in the name of our team I want to introduce you to our new fresh creation:

The Piano Encyclopedia- the first practical encyclopedia for keyboard playing, composing, and improvising in the world.

More than 350 pages of unique content and more than 300 original full-color illustrations of piano keyboards, showing how to play scales, chords, intervals, as well as how to harmonize scales on the piano.

Learn about our Mission

Our mission is to help music and piano learning become an easier task revealing practical techniques that are not usually taught and can help you improve your playing and composing skills through a deep understanding of how music really works.

We concentrate on your needs

• You want to learn piano without having to spend years practicing?
• Tired of playing everybody else’s songs and not being able to compose one note yourself?
• Tired of not knowing how to play this or that chord that always appears in your favorite songs?
• Wouldn’t you like to print in a booklet-form all your most used chords and have an easy way to study and memorize them?
• Tired of not understanding music behind scores?!
• Every teacher tries to teach you scales but yet any can’t tell you what they are used for?! Get answers, get power!
• Learn how to use scales for improvising and composing, or even learn how to predict what chord comes next in your favorite songs!
• You want results and you want them fast?!
• Your piano chord, interval, and scale, questions will be answered forever!
• You get a chord dictionary with all the existent chords used in piano playing: Jazz, Blues, classical, chords from every style.
• You get a scale dictionary with all the existent scales on the piano, all ordered by their use: common scales, major and minor mode scales, jazz scales, arabic scales, blue scales, and even rare scales.
• You get an interval dictionary with all the used intervals on the piano: common intervals, extended intervals (9th, 11ths, 13ths), and all types of alterations explained, so that you understand graphically how chords and scales are made up from!
• You get a Harmony dictionary that explains what chords you should play in each given scale! You get the harmonies for all the most used scales: the common scales and all 35 modal minor and major scales.
• More than 40 scales with examples of how they should be harmonized so that you can begin composing and improvising on any scale you want!
• You get a chord dictionary, a scale dictionary, an intervals dictionary, and a harmony dictionary all in one in this great encyclopedia!
• And if this is not enough: you get also samples of chord progressions and instructions on how to create them, as well as additional music theory!
• I am sure you still want more: so we have also prepared special lessons designed special for this encyclopedia so that you can use all this material more wisely and structure you own piano lessons and enlighten your path to becoming beter at piano playing, composing, and improvising!
• The Piano Encyclopedia will provide you with tools to maximize your learning capabilities and make important progress achivements, in much more reduced times!

Release

The final version is not ready yet but we are working on it to provide you with the best content to create the first practical encylopedia for piano playing, composing, and improvising in the world.

Make sure to check back often for updates and our release date!

Leave your comments and also request new features!

Cheers and hope to see you back soon!,

Rod

P.S: We’ll be releasing a FREE dictionary! Vote in the poll on the right panel so that we can decide if to release a FREE chord, scale, intervals, or harmony dictionary!!! Be heard! We listen to YOU!