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