Piano Marvel

What is Piano Marvel

Piano Marvel is an advanced piano learning app created by professional teachers. You can use it with a PC, Mac, or iPad. It contains many useful features that streamline exercise and motivate you to achieve goals faster. 

Each piece is categorized at a level – beginner, intermediate, advanced and professional with many pieces available in several levels of difficulty. The range of pieces, alongside the variety of method and technical exercises allows the user to identify strengths and be awarded virtual trophies for this. The midi input to your keyboard helps identify what you have played correctly or incorrectly. 

What we love about Piano Marvel

An excellent feature of the app is the dedicated technique section which is something that is often overlooked in play along applications. There is a clear emphasis throughout the app on helping the user to understand their current level and guide them step by step in how to improve. The practice goals that you can set yourself encourages you to commit to your piano playing.

The library is vast with thousands of songs available and updated regularly as well as some additional content such as ‘Scale Ninja’. This additional feature is hugely encouraging for students’ practice as it includes a leaderboard for you to compete with other users. There are also associated Ninja coloured belts which are awarded for your high scores! In the library you can go straight in to repertoire at whichever level you currently feel you are at or you can look in the ‘Boot Camps’ section to work through piano method books. The repertoire is exciting, allowing you to play recent pop and film hits like The Greatest Showman, Aladdin, Ed Sheeran as well as a variety of other repertoire. One suggestion for improvement would be to include Jazz repertoire on the site and include this as a genre that can be searched for.

One of the best features of the app is the sight reading section with the incorporated SASR – Standard Assessment of Sight Reading. There is a graph which allows you to track your sight reading progress over time. The assessment measures your current ability through your playing of material at different levels. There are tips to help you improve your sight reading and you can check back periodically to retest and train yourself. This is a unique and hugely useful aspect of the app for any pianist. Sight reading is one the most common areas of weakness in performers. Many people struggle to know how to improve their sight reading. The encouraging and progressive nature of the SASR is a huge benefit for any pianist.

Is Piano Marvel free?

Piano Marvel is free. You get over 25,000 songs and exercises, sight reading tests, reports, progress tracking and more with a free account. 

How much does Piano Marvel costs?

Piano Marvel costs $15.99 per month or $9.25 per month billed annually.

Is the Piano Marvel easy to use?

After doing a Piano Marvel review we think the app is quite easy to use. When you enter the app you will need to set up an account and provide your email address and password. Once you sign up for the Premium account, it unlocks all the availability including the ability to be linked to a teacher who can keep track of your progress. The price, although not inexpensive, is much cheaper than a private piano tutor and provides good value for money when considering the amount of sheet music content, as well as the apps ability to assist with daily practice.

The dashboard is very straightforward with clear statistics about your progress including minutes of practice that month, goals set and how many days you have in your practice streak. Below this info are the four key areas of the app for you to use in order to develop your piano playing abilities – ‘Library’ (where all of the pieces are stored for you to choose freely what you would like to learn), ‘Method’ (where you can learn note and rhythm basics with exercises), ‘Technique’ (where you can improve the physical aspects of playing) and ‘Sight Reading’ (a unique aspect to the app where you can assess and progress with playing new material quickly).

You can choose which section to start work in and all areas are accessible at different levels. This is especially useful if you know where your area of weakness is. For example, sight reading or ear training (technique). However, there is a requirement for you to be able to read basic notation in order to access any of the library of pieces to play. Therefore, if you are brand new to playing and reading music I would recommend starting with the ‘Method’ section and working through these basics before choosing a song to learn from the library. The method section includes a PDF booklet with explanation of the different exercises that you can play along with and useful video tutorials for each of these. You can then progress through each exercise, repeating any that you find a challenge or skip through to harder ones if you are finding it easy. The app suits the pace that you want to go at.

What the Piano Marvel could improve on

One slight limitation is that the app is not accessible without internet access. It would be useful if you could download some material e.g. technique or method information and exercises so that you could play on other pianos where you might not have internet access. However, there is the possibility of printing scores from the app so you would be able to access material in this way if you were prepared in advance! The other limitation is that you can only be assessed on the app if you connect with a midi keyboard. It would be nice if there was a microphone option for assessment too as many students learn on acoustic pianos.

Overall rating

I would recommend Piano Marvel to anyone wanting to learn the piano at home. Piano Marvel is suitable for anyone learning piano and most ideally for secondary school students wishing to track their progress and receive instant feedback on their playing. The user statics, clarity of the app and elements of competition make it highly suitable for teenagers. I would also recommend it to adults who have previously had lessons whilst in education and would like to continue their development independently.

You can download Piano Marvel on your iOS devices from the Apple App Store.

You can download Piano Marvel on your Windows devices from the Windows Store.