Rocket Piano Review

For several years now, Rocket Piano has been a very popular choice for learn-at-home piano students. Rocket Piano is multimedia piano curriculum specifically designed for beginners with little or no prior knowledge of the piano.

Rocket Piano does its best to make learning an enjoyable and fun experience since it’s hard for anyone to learn piano through dry and boring exercises. The Rocket Piano curriculum builds up your piano skills quickly and gets you playing real music as soon as possible.

Your instructor will be Ruth Searle, a classically trained pianist from New Zealand (And yes, she’s got that cute Kiwi accent…). Ms. Searle has a bachelor of arts in music, has won an Australasian award for composition, and has experience performing in many different styles of piano.

Most people choose to get Rocket Piano as a download, but you do have the option buy the physical version of the course (DVDs, CDs, workbooks, etc.). Due to the large price difference though, we recommend that you stick with the downloadable version. Besides the cheaper price, you can start learning within a few minutes after purchasing.

Features

The Rocket Piano course includes:

3 Lesson Workbooks (Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced) – These lesson workbooks are the heart of the Rocket Piano lessons. The books have 165, 65, and 59 pages respectively. All of the books are professionally designed and aptly-illustrated with diagrams, notation and multimedia indicators.

This extensive course focuses on all the fundamentals of playing piano. Throughout the course, short tests are presented to test your knowledge of the material, and you can track your progress in one of the pages as well. You’ll learn about proper fingering, intervals, chords, arpeggios, scales, music notation, theory, and a whole lot more. You’ll be taught to play music both by ear and by sight-reading, both incredibly important skills to master if you want to be successful pianist.

2 Genre Workbooks (Jazz Piano & the Gospel, Spiritual, and Hymns Book) – If you want a great introduction to the fascinating genres of Jazz and Gospel, you will enjoy going through these workbooks. As with the main lesson workbooks, there are audio and video files that correspond to the different lessons.

191 audio files - These audio files demonstrate how all of the different exercises, songs, and examples should sound. There’s nothing quite as frustrating as playing something, but not being sure of what it should sound like.

57 video lessons – Throughout the course, you will be prompted to refer to theses mini video lessons for extra insight and live demonstration of how to master a technique or skill. The videos are succinct and to the point and clearly show what you need to learn. Video quality is good, but the resolution of the video could have been higher in our opinion.

17 Jam Tracks - All songs were professionally recorded and are a lot of fun to play along with. Each song comes with 2 versions (34 files in total) – One with piano accompaniment and one without, so you can eventually play with the band by yourself.

Online Question and Answer Video Lessons: This is a new feature of the member’s area that feature questions from Rocket Piano students and show a video lesson response from Ruth Searle. There are currently only 5 Q&A video lessons available, but more are expected to follow.

Lifelong Membership: If any new content is added to Rocket Piano in the future (i.e. new software, additional lessons, etc.), you will always be able to access and download it from the member’s area.

Bonuses:

• Advanced Learning Techniques for Piano eBook – This is a memory and learning technique book that really has a lot of helpful advice on how to learn the proper way, while avoiding many of the pitfalls of developing bad habits. Read this a few times as you start learning piano, it’s good stuff!
• Perfect your Pitch Pro – A computer game that can actually develop your ear for music. It can take a while to get the hang of, but this software makes it easy and fun at the same time.
•  Jayde Musica Pro – Great game that will quickly allow you to memorize all the notes on the keyboard.
• Chordinator - Teaches how to read easily read piano chords
• Rocket Piano Metronome – Many piano students don’t understand how helpful it can be to work on your timing and rhythm with a metronome. The digital one included is adequate, but if you don’t have a real metronome, we suggest you get one early on in your practicing.
• Free 1-month SongPond membership – SongPond is an innovative online music school that focuses specifically on teaching music students how to play their favorite songs. SongPond constantly adds new video lessons and is always taking requests for upcoming lessons.

There are a few usability issues with Rocket Piano and we’ll mention them here. Most of the material can be downloaded in zip files, which saves you a lot of time downloading. However, for all the 57 videos you currently have to download them individually, which can take a fair amount of time. Also, if you are on dial-up, the course may be a bit too large for you to download, as it weighs in at over 350MB. As you have to download the course components by yourself, Rocket Piano seems to favor those with a least some rudimentary computer experience, which not everyone possesses.  If any of these issues are relevant to you, your best option would be to take a look at our #1 Overall choice for piano lessons, Learn and Master Piano.

Support

For customer service inquiries you can always contact Rocket Piano staff via email. In addition, they have a very thorough FAQ area where you can see answers to their most common questions.

Besides the option of contacting Rocket Piano staff via email for customer service inquiries, you will also be entitled to a free piano consultation where you can ask piano-related questions to the folks at Rock Star Recipes.

For those worried about software compatibility, note that you have the option to download the software included in the package for either a PC or a Mac.

Ordering Information

Ordering is done through a secure payment processor and accepts PayPal and the major credit cards (Mastercard, Visa)

Buyer’s Tip #1: Be aware that Rocket Piano’s price sometimes fluctuates up and down, but the lowest we’ve seen to date is $39.95.

Buyer’ Tip #2: If learning how to sing has always been a dream of yours, this buyer’s tip might interest you. After purchasing Rocket Piano, you will have the option of getting Singorama for 61% off retail price. This is an exclusive deal from Rock Star Recipes and we have no way of knowing when the deal will expire.

All purchases come with a standard 60-day 100% money-back guarantee. This is great as it allows you to ‘try out’ Rocket Piano completely risk-free. If you purchased the physical version of the course, you have to return it for the full refund.

Conclusion

Though it has a couple usability quirks, we definitely have to say that Rocket Piano is the best downloadable piano course available on the internet and gives you the most bang for your buck! With this course, you get a solid multimedia course with enough material to last you for many months of enjoyable learning.