SpiralTruth

Being a guitar player, I’ve been sort of reluctant to succumb to the whole Guitar Hero thing. I don’t know whether it’s the years of practice reduced to six colored buttons or the fact that it’s sometimes a lot more fun than actually playing an indie show, but something about it just makes me want to break down and cry. All those wasted years.

After all, in the game you have crowds and reliable gear and awesome stages and… did I mention crowds?

Anyway, I have recently been lured into playing a song or two (cough, cough) and I started wondering if someone had made something like this for the piano. A pianist actually plays keys as opposed to strings, so Piano Hero would be closer to the real thing than Guitar Hero by default. Turn the complexity up a bit more by having your game “controller” fitted with a full 88 keys, and voila: your very own electronic piano teacher!

Enter Synthesia:

The video above is from Sean at hdpiano.com, and it uses a FREE software app that you can get for Mac or PC at www.synthesiagame.com.

Take a few minutes to poke around the site. You’ll get to read the creator Nicholas Piegdon’s correspondence with Activision’s legal department, which is pretty awesome on both sides. Piegdon responds to the cease and desist letter as any solitary developer facing a software Goliath would: with an unequivocal YES! But he throws in a little extra humor and asserts his own position in a way that seems to even melt the folks at Activision a bit – prompting them to explain a bit more why they were being so harsh.

I’ve taken the software for a spin via my trusty Mac and midi keyboard and have to say it’s pretty damn cool! In fact, I had to wade through some other big players in the computer-assisted piano teaching arena to get to it and this blows them all out of the water. The best thing about it is that you can use any .mid file that you can find on the Internet, so you can start playing all your favorite songs without having to find and study the sheet music.

So to answer the number one question that’s on your minds: yes, it was completely your piano teacher’s fault that the instrument was so boring. Reclaim the fun!