Teaches you the piano notes by starting the song and asking you to hit the correct keys for the sounds, it will only proceed to the next part of the song when you have pressed the correct key for the correct note. There is also a progression tracker that keeps your performance up to date.
Synthesia offers a both entertaining and effective way of learning to play the piano. It is in fact one of the most interesting piano learning solutions that I’ve ever come across, as it incorporates some truly remarkable features and cool functions. For example, it comes with a handy melody practice mode in which it waits for you to play the correct note before moving on to the next one. This allows you to practice at your own speed, the application being capable of adapting the lesson to your skill level, and being therefore suitable for both complete beginners and more advanced users.
Synthesia is also interesting as it makes practicing resemble a game. Falling notes have to be matched and played accordingly for every played song. Many songs are included, but most of them are not offered for free and have to be purchased separately. You can also enable musical notation (the music sheets) for the played songs and practice your hands separately. Of course, as in any game, progress tracking is an important matter and Synthesia offers an accurate feedback and long term tracking that help you precisely check your improvements. Anyway, these are just a few of the many things Synthesia has to offer. It’s a really comprehensive and feature-rich tool that comes packed with a lot of cool functions.
To sum it all up, Synthesia is a handy tool that makes learning to play piano an interesting and entertaining experience as well as an effective task.
v8.4.0.2242 [Dec 8, 2012]
--Completely new keyboard graphics! Remastered falling-note graphics, too.
--The old, single "Played by Synthesia, Notes Muted" style setting for an instrument has been broken up into independently controllable components: Played by Me/Synthesia, Shown/Hidden, and Sounded/Muted. This allows for two modes not previously available: me|hidden|sounded and me|hidden|muted.
--Change the color theme via the settings screen.
--Summary play statistics have been added to the profiles section of the settings screen for each user profile.
--An "All Songs (grouped by folder)" entry in the song library will help users take advantage of their meticulously organized MIDI folders.
--The "Background Instruments" and "The Other Hand" items in the Songs section of the Settings screen will control how the parts that you don't elect to play (via the simple song view) will be handled.
--Synthesia will now prompt you before leaving a song early if you've already
earned points. (Control with advanced "Gameplay.ConfirmEarlyExit" option.)
--Track colors for left/right/both hands are now set automatically. The left hand is always blue. Right/both is always green. Disabling the Gameplay.SimpleReplaceColors setting in the config tool will prevent this.
--Gameplay.AutoShiftToBestOctave advanced setting can now be disabled to suppress the smart octave shift behavior whenever you change song settings.
--A "Notation.ShowUserNotes" advanced setting to hide user sheet music notes.
--Drag-pan the paused song, shimmy the keyboard when zoomed in or scroll through the song list. Best when used with touch-screens. Disable using the "System.DragPanning" advanced option.
--Error count is now reset if you rewind to the very beginning of song.
--Double-click in falling note area to pause or resume the song.
--The song list now scrolls smoothly instead of going page by page.
--Increased the window of time given to hit a note correctly.
--Input is now echoed to output devices on every screen (though the software keyboard only works in the Music Devices section of Settings and Play).
--The on-screen keyboard now shows user input, even while paused.
--Middle-C note marker has been replaced with every-octave labels on C.
--Shortcuts can now have eight bindings, up from three.
--The "Do Nothing" choice for the "Notes Outside My Range" setting has been removed. The default is now "Play them for me".
--The percussion icon option is now tri-state: always shown, only when playing percussion, or never shown.
--Removed "Keyboard Height" setting. Small keyboard ranges now always have their height limited.
--Flattened the included song groups in the song library a little.
--Hard resets are now disabled by default.
--Metronome is now disabled by default.
--Removed song library flags.
--The "First Pieces" in the G Major Music Theory set no longer count as Learning Pack demo songs. (Reverted from 0.8.3.)
--Dropped the leading "0." part of the version number.
--Touch-screens should no longer require two taps to "click" buttons.
--Hang when zoom to "Visible Song Notes" in songs with any C0, C#0, or D0.
--Strange control characters could make text boxes behave strangely.
--The FPS display is now larger and easier to read against busy backgrounds.
--Finger hints can no longer be added to notes on hidden tracks.
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