Fun Piano Lessons for Every Level – PianoWithWillie Review

Do you struggle with finding a way to get all your kiddos to piano lessons? I know that is a concern for many homeschooling families. Finding a great way to give your kids a way to learn to read music without spending a fortune and spending all day each week carting them back and forth to piano lessons is clearly a goal.

Recently I had the opportunity to review PianoWithWillie from JazzEdge. JazzEdge is a company founded by Willie Myette, Berklee College of Music graduate because he wanted a place to put all of his jazz education and performance ventures in one place. He later expanded JazzEdge into piano and drum lessons for every level as well raising appeal to the homeschool community.

JazzEdge offers 3 programs: Easy Piano Basics, PianoWithWillie, and DrumsWithWillie for various musical levels. I recently reviewed PianoWithWillie.

PianoWithWillie is an online, streaming video piano program that is meant for those with previous piano knowledge and experience. THS IS NOT A BEGINNER PROGRAM, though there are “beginner” levels within the program.

The PianoWithWillie program is designed to build your piano skills and help you learn to improvise, extend your rhythm knowledge and grow as a piano musician. Offering both Studio and Premier access to PianoWithWillie lessons, students have access for one year with a standard subscription to everything available in the PianoWihtWillie program.

What you see in the lessons – i LOVE this view, don’t you?

The program includes all levels of lessons from Beginner to Advanced. The online, streamed video lessons are approximately 5-20 minutes each, depending upon the lesson, and can be done in any order, though there is a recommended order to move through.

You can use the program as often as you want and work on whatever skill you want to focus on.

Some of the lesson topics included in the PianoWithWillie include:

Basics
Improvisations
Create an Arrangement
Chord Improv
Major Scale Patterns
Tritone Substitution
Rootless Chords with Baseline

As you can see, there is some advanced topics covered but topics that basic piano lessons just don’t cover. I really like this about the program. These are topics that I really didn’t get any training in during my early years of lessons so i was excited for these.

I started at the beginning because I wanted to see how to move through the program. Then, after a few lessons, I skipped around and worked on specific songs or styles that interested me.

Each lesson is a video streamed lesson and shows your instructor, Willie, talking to you at the top of your screen while the split screen lower half shows a closeup of the keyboard. This allows you to see clearing what notes are being played and helps you focus on the keyboard if necessary. Additionally, the program highlights on the keyboard what keys are being played, allowing you to clearly see what is happening on the keyboard to help you reproduce the music or sound or style that is being covered in the lesson.

Most lessons include a download of sheet music, which are emailed to you when you select the lesson so you can practice after the lesson. If the lesson requires that you download something beforehand, there will be a note on that lesson online.

I also liked that you could learn some popular classics and rock/pop songs as well. I had fun with a few of these and since they were in my lessons I was able to download the sheet music and work on them as well as have the lesson

Explanation of pop song lesson

The online PianoWithWillie program tracks the lessons you have completed so you can easily see where you left off which is especially helpful if you are moving through the program in order.

There are several bonus lessons that Willie sends out too. I received an email every week or so during the review period with bonus lessons, which was interesting. There was even a live lesson offered during that time where you could meet with Willie online during the live lesson time and ask questions regarding the lesson. This was a pretty cool extra!

I used the program several times a week during the review and really enjoyed the lessons. I didn’t practice much in between, to be honest, and I even repeated a couple of lessons to get a handle on what was being covered. I liked that you could easily repeat lessons anytime if you wanted to really master something that was being covered.

Overall, I really liked the program. Some of the things I liked about it included:

-easy to follow lessons
-short lesson duration
-online tracking of what you have already accomplished
-fun, extra lessons on popular music
-easy to download sheet music
-work on ear training and sight reading both

There really aren’t any down sides I see to the program. You can move at your pace, learn and expand skills in the areas that interest you, and develop your piano abilities of reading music and playing by ear. These are all great lessons for every piano player regardless of previous experience.

Check out PianoWithWillie yourself. To learn more about PianoWithWillie, you can sign up for a free trial, or purchase a monthly ($49,) quarterly ($99,) or annual ($399) subscription.

Be sure to see what the rest of the TOS Review Crew had to say about PianoWithWillie or other JazzEdge products by clicking the button below.