Piano Improvisation Review - Yoke Wong

Independent products are very, very hit or miss in terms of quality and truth. There are more bad products on the market made by people with a handful of hours’ worth of musical education than there are good product made by people with an understanding of just what it is they are doing, why they are doing it and more importantly, how to explain it.

This is something that is very hard to tell from a quick glance at a site, especially seeing as independent product makers tend to fill their site page with claims and testimonies and promises and all sorts of things that are little more than a dumbed down plea for you to buy their product.

In this article, we’ll find out which category http://www.pianoimprov2.com falls into.

So what is http://www.pianoimprov2.com? It is a site by a woman named Yoke Wong, who, like most people who make independent products, think they have the answer to every question a failed pianist has ever asked. Her small line of piano programs is all about hand eye coordination, one of the most important aspects of piano playing.

Now, you may be asking yourself, how is there a series on such a simple topic? Well, your guess is just as good as ours. In fact, once developed, hand and eye coordination in piano playing is one of those things that are automatic responses—your hands go just where they need to be, because you have developed that beautiful thing called muscle memory.

But maybe there is an explanation. Maybe the courses are cheap and they are just parts of a short running series.

Nope.

Ms. Wong’s series is quite extensive, spanning more than a dozen discs in total. We will say it straight out; this is entirely unnecessary. Most programs geared toward teaching you how to play the piano from a beginner to an intermediate level, touching on a few advanced topics, span less than a dozen discs. All in all, it seems Ms. Wong got a bit carried away. In fact, she goes so far as to relate playing tone to hand and eye coordination, two things which are not dependent on one another.

In fact, hand eye coordination only affects your ability to play a set series of notes, which would mean that you are playing a prearranged piece, not something into which your own style is very much alive. Tone is derived from the amount of pressure and the phrasing you use, something that can be symbolic to even the most remedial player.

In the end, the price is the biggest kicker. For a program that spans a relatively small area, and doesn’t offer much outside that small area, these programs are very expensive. They aren’t lessons in the sense that you are developing ability in a musical way—you are simply further developing your coordination, something that would be achieved using any popular DVD course on beginner piano playing. For an ambitious product, this program falls shy of the mark by quite a distance.