Piano Apps

I hope you all had a wonderful and restful vacation! Now that we are getting back into the swing of things, I wanted to give you a few ideas to shake up your new year, and help us get off to a running start. Many of you have asked me about good music apps to enhance your practice time at home. With so many iPhone/iPod/iPads around, and I've seen that many of you have them, I thought I'd make a list of my favorite music apps:


1) Note Squish - This is a game designed to improve sight reading. It is quite fun, and simple. And it is easy to adjust the note ranges and the speed of the game for all levels.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/note-squish/id381536270?mt=8

2) Piano Tutor - For more advanced students, this app is great because it is very versatile. Including training in sight reading, as well as key signatures and tonalities and even ear training (anyone out there have perfect pitch?). 
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pianotutor/id305152588?mt=8

3) My First Classical Music App - This app is a great introduction to the classical music genre. With interactive pages about the parts of the orchestra, an introduction to some of the major composers, and samples of music on each page this is a wonderful teaching tool that is also being implemented in many music classrooms. If only they made these for other genres as well!
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my-first-classical-music-app/id470865535?mt=8

4) Metronome - in lieu of purchasing a metronome, there are many apps out there you can use to help you keep a consistent tempo, the one I use in lessons is a free app. It is not perfect, and misses beats occasionally because it does not turn off all of your device's other functions while it runs. It is also not perfectly accurate on the beats per minute speeds. Nonetheless, I have still found it an effective tool to teach tempo. Some of the paid apps are more accurate.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/metronome/id287965434?mt=8

Enjoy!