[ 2024-02-12 Update ] During the COVID year (2020) most piano teachers weren’t taking personal students. But I had just recently retired and wanted to spend more time working on my piano skillz.
Skoove experiences
I knew the basics of piano playing, music theory and reading, and had been trying to teach myself uising books. Although I made a certain amount (small) of progress, it became apparent to me that I needed something more to get ahead with any speed.
When I first looked at skoove, I thought it looked interesting, but I didn’t have a compatible tablet, and my old keyboard didn’t even have USB output — only MIDI. But (again during the COVID layoffs) I had acquired a basic Lenovo Chromebook to do zoom meetings and such, and as mentioned elsewhere, bought a Yamaha CP88 digital piano. Suddenly skoove became something interesting to try, since it ran on a web browser which Chromebook does support.
I started out with the free version which was pretty good. It’s limited on the number of lessons available but gives you a good sense of how the product works. I decided to plump for the licensed version, and didn’t regret it.
There are plenty of reviews out there on web magazines and such. Most of them were pretty positive and rated skoove in the top tier of web-based piano learning software. Of course it’s simple to give it a try. I liked the basic design and the fact that it forced me to sight-read. The song or exercises notation scrolls from right to left and hghlights when you hit the right notes. The built-in piano sound is not bad, but I figured out how to run MIDI into and out of the application so it could trigger my nice Yamaha piano.
I was frustrated that I couldn’t print out the exercises so I could practice when somewhere in front of a real piano, or when I didn’t feel like turning on the Chromebook, logging into the application, etc. I’m sure there were also licensing issues about permitting that. Latency was fine, especially for a beginner/intermediate player like me.
Unfortunately in 2023 skoove announced they weren’t going to support configurations like mine, so I had to regretfully say farewell and look for another application.
Flowkey
I don’t know why I rejected Flowkey in favor of skoove originally. It seems to do all skoove does, but better. It still does support my Chromebook/web setup. One thing it has that’s really good is for many songs you can select a beginning/intermediate/advanced arrangement.
Like skoove, Flowkey scrolls the music from right to left, and you can’t print it. I did mention this on messages through the support part of their app, and I was pleased to see that support people were extremely fast to reply and seemed to care that my questions were answered the best that they could be.
They have lots of songs, but sometimes they’re only brief excerpts. And navigating the song library is a bit frustrating. Skoove had that problem too.
So I did subscribe to Flowkey and at present unless they make some awful changes, I’m planning to stick with it.
crow caw music works 