Learn an instrument
Brush up your skills on the piano, guitar or other musical instrument with your PC’s help.
Music is far more than just the food of love – it’s nourishment for our very soul. And what better way is there to express yourself than through music? It’s never too late to pick up an instrument, whether starting from scratch or picking up where you left off years – or even decades – ago.
The good news is that your PC can provide you with all the support you need to develop your musical abilities as well as record your ongoing progress and even provide you with the means of writing your own pieces.
Start with PlayPerfect (w w w. nchsoftware.com/practice/), a free program to help you practice your instrument between lessons. It provides a series of pieces to play along to through your microphone, using an optional metronome to help with tempo.
During installation you’ll be offered several related programs – including
PitchPerfect to aid the tuning of your guitar.
You’ll also be offered Crescendo, a musical notation program for creating and editing pieces to add to PlayPerfect. We’d recommend you skip this in favour of MuseScore (https://musescore.org/ en). Unlike Crescendo, it’s completely free and open source, plus it supports a wider selection file formats, making it easier to source whatever pieces you’re currently learning through sites such as www.free-scores.com – make sure they’re formatted as two staves, and export them from MuseScore as .mid files to use in PlayPerfect. If you have a MIDI keyboard with suitable USB-to-MIDI
cable (around $20-$30, try www. artistguitars.com.au), then check out LMMS (https://lmms.io/), a free recording tool that can be used to record anything from practice sessions to full-blown original compositions.