Been using this system every single day for 5 months (42% of my way through bootcamp) and I'm starting to wonder if it will ever take me to my goal of competency with playing and sight reading.Simplified playing along to songs with live feeback is clever, but the feedback system essentially demands 100% note accuracy and 90% timing or you fail. This is increasingly difficult and frustrating as the song tempo and complexity increases. No live piano teacher would be so demanding. Progress is NOT linear - there are some VERY fast pieces early on that throw a total spanner in the works of your steady progress, only to be followed by an easy piece again. Worse still, sessions actively disincentivises longer practice, because a single note wrong will ruin your progress, requiring a reset, and after doing that a few times, frustration likely causes you to quit in irritation. My bro is doing the program at his home, and he says exactly the same thing.Worse still, the program outright bugs out, with the live position indicator varying its speed of tracking through some pieces, and refusing to read my bro's piano half the time.Also there are zero TECHNIQUE tutorials as part of the actual course. Where should I sit, how should I hold my hands, how long should I stick with each song? Some you can 100% in a day, others take weeks or longer. What other skills should I be practicing? How hard should I press the keys? Is it okay to look at the keyboard? Am I better or worse than the average player? Sure there are videos on youtube, if I want to go looking for them, but they are not integrated into the Rookie course for instance, whereas I would expect them to be fundamental parts of learning.There's a vast amount of content, but no cohesive thread guiding you through it. Yes, there's a numbered rookie, intermediate, and advanced section where you simply play a variety of songs, but they alone are not enough to guide you to competency.The gameified learning is superb, but just as playing Scrabble won't teach you how to become a writer, I'm starting to fear, that this program will not ultimately teach me piano.I enjoy the system, and so far as I can see, it's the only course that gives you constant live feedback; even if it feels like a short tempered teacher constantly ready to rap you over the knuckles with a ruler for each mistake.The song variety is broad enough to keep it interesting, and even when you encounter songs you dislike, you know the next might be more to your taste. In any case, you'll come to hate even the ones you used to like after repeating them for a solid month. ;-)There are SO many great ways to adjust the playing - including adjusting the number of bars on a line, changing the zoom, the playback speed, whether fingers, note names, or neither are displayed, and much more.The tunes do not play along when you go to the slower speeds. There are SOOO many ways that this course could be better, but there are also SOOO many great things about it. I don't regret buying the lifetime course for me and my bro. He has stuck with this, whereas he never did with a live teacher.I would like to see the company make more regular improvements to the software and course design and structure.The presenters are really likable, even if you don't see enough of them.I would buy again, especially in one of the constant sales, but there's great room for improvement.
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