Play Piano Tonight Review

Play Piano Tonight is a creation of Mr. Ron Worthy, an accomplished and skilled pianist that has started several different piano-related websites to teach piano over the internet, including MrRonsMusic.com, PlayPianoAndReadMusic.com, and of course PlayPianoTonight.com. The main component of the course is an eBook that combines different multimedia elements to enlighten and inform students of the wonders of the keyboard.

Now if you went by the name of this piano course, you might think that Play Piano Tonight is a beginners piano course, and indeed, it is advertised as such. We found this to be a huge mistake, as beginning pianists will be extremely disappointed with the material provided in this course. Mr. Ron Worthy is an excellent musician, but having said that, it’s quite possible he’s forgotten what it’s like to be a new pianist.

Features

Our Experience with Play Piano Tonight:

Usually when you purchase a digital music course, you should receive it within several minutes. However, after purchasing Play Piano Tonight, I didn’t receive any username or password to login to the member’s area. I quickly contacted Mr. Ron  about the issue, and received a response a couple hours later that he has to manually approve each member’s login details which I found rather inconvenient. Once my credentials were received I had problems logging in as well, since when I entered my username /password combination, it just redirected me to the main page of the website. I later realized that the username/password is case-sensitive, but there was no error message given that the password was wrong. So far… not so good.

The membership area is basically a single html webpage that contains the entire Play Piano Tonight eBook. Unfortunately, there isn’t even a standard.pdf available for download to your computer. The webpage has all the sheet music and exercises embedded into it, as well as download links for the sound clips, movies, and accompaniment tracks. When we copied the contents of the page into a Microsoft Word document, it totalled only 25 pages.

If you are looking for the complete multimedia piano course, let me just say right here that Play Piano Tonight is probably not what you’re after. The video lessons are of poor quality, the audio is imbalanced, and the lessons are hard to follow along with. As skilled a musician as Mr. Worthy is, his teaching ability could also use a bit of polish. We couldn’t help but notice that he talks very fast, and tends to mutter a fair bit, which makes him quite hard to understand.

The course definitely suffers from the lack of good quality video lessons. When talking with Mr. Worthy on the phone he made it clear that he didn’t believe that video piano lessons were all that important, which is something I very much disagree with.

I’ll repeat here that even though it seems to market itself to newcomers to piano, Play Piano Tonight is NOT for beginners. To illustrate this, the first lesson that Mr. Worthy drops on you is how to memorize major, minor and dominant 7th chords. No beginner orientation, no learning the notes on the keyboard or how to read music, no basic technique training… not even music theory 101. It only gets worse from here on. Conversely, if you already are somewhat proficient in piano, you may appreciate the more advanced learning curve that Play Piano Tonight provides.

Play Piano Tonight teaches a lot of music theory such as scale tones, progressions, chord studies, arpeggio studies, and more. It’s easy to get confused as there isn’t a natural flow or structure to the course.

Bonuses Included:

• SheetMusicDigital.com Membership - A nice extra to the course is a Free Emerald Membership to SheetMusicDigital.com. (Mr. Worthy is friends with the owner of the site and worked out a special deal) This membership normally sells for $19.95 and allows you to download 1000s of public domain sheet music files free of charge. Once again however I ran into problems when I tried to enter the special registration key that was provided as the site still wanted to charge me an additional $9.95. I had to contact both Mr. Worthy and SheetMusicDigital.com in order to get the key to work properly. We’re still not sure if that lifetime membership offer is still available for Mr. Worthy’s customers.
• VanBasco Karaoke Player: This is a freeware program that can be downloaded free at http://www.vanbasco.com/karaokeplayer/

Support

You can reach Ron Worthy on the phone number listed on his websites, or by email. He is generally quite quick to respond to customer inquiries. On his site he also mentions that if you need help with your piano playing you can “get personal email or telephone guidance directly from him”, though I don’t think it would be all that helpful, considering some of the responses we personally received from him.

Play Piano Tonight also boasts a forum, but whenever we tried to check it out, it was having technical difficulties and wouldn’t load properly.

Ordering Information

Orders are placed through a secure ecommerce website. PayPal and major credit cards are accepted. Play Piano Tonight comes with the standard 60-day digital product guarantee. If you think that the course is not worth the price tag you can apply for refund within that timeframe. After discovering that this course wasn’t worth what I paid for I applied for a refund. Not very long afterwards, I received an angry email from Mr. Ron stating that “I was an idiot” and an “old fool” due to my incompetency in being able to follow directions. Not exactly the friendliest chap in the world…

If you order Play Piano Tonight, be aware that you will probably not receive your login information for at least a couple of hours, as Mr. Worthy personally administers the login information for every member.

Conclusion

The name of Mr. Worthy’s company is RAW productions. From what we’ve seen, "raw" is a very fitting description of his work. Poor production value and poor quality teaching combine for yet another piano learning site that leaves a lot to be desired.

If you can afford to buy Play Piano Tonight, you should definitely give Learn and Master Piano a look. You’ll get a much higher quality course that takes advantage of DVD video lessons and is great for beginners. If you are looking specifically for a downloadable piano course, a decent alternative to Play Piano Tonight would be Rocket Piano.