Playground Forums

Everyone,

My name is Mike and I really enjoy all kinds of music and playing different instruments. I recently started this piano course and really love how it meets my needs and ability. Unlike some of the super musically wired brains I read about, it takes me hours of practice, instead of minutes. I have made progress, slow, but still making progress as my brain learns to use both hands and my eyes to read both treble and bass staff.

Software timing tip I learned this morning... I set my keyboard up with a background layer of strings and some reverb ... a more pleasing sound to me than plain piano. I started playing the song and all notes I played were shown as being late. I shut down the software and tried again, same thing. I then reset to plain piano and that fixed it...
Also, I've found out that if the the scrolling bar starts slightly jerking while proceeding through the song, just shut down the software and restart. This is more of a computer process overload issue and I've only had this happen during long sessions.

Thanks for the post, Mike

Andrew

Awesome tips Mike!

I'd like to add in a tip I found when your scrollling line begins to skip in between parts while playing or the count on the metronome seems "off": I found that my computer is *defragging the hard drive (it goes into a "maintenance mode" when you havent moved your mouse for a specific amount of time). This always seems to happen when I download a course or bootcamp lesson for the day. So I've been downloading tommorow's lesson plan the day before and defragging the hard drive.

* This tip applies to anyone who has Playground Sessions installed onto a traditional mechanical hard drive NOT a Solid-State drive

Mike...

Because you had two instrument layers active on your keyboard, it was sending each note twice over the MIDI port - one for each instrument. That happens probably because Playground has to listen to all channels at once to see everything you're doing on the keyboard and because it plays to the lowest common skill level - not everyone will know how to go into their keyboard and either disable (or even be able to depending on the keyboard) sending on the second instrument. Playground listens on every channel of the MIDI port so that no matter what the keyboard sends on, Playground can see it.

The speed you will pickup new music will improve as you spend the thousands of minutes up front getting your brain wired for music. You, and I, are in that building phase. It will be a long time before I get to where I only need minutes to learn a new song - if ever!

The Disk Defrag isn't the only maintenance you have to worry about disrupting app performance. Playground Sessions needs real time performance, and Windows doesn't usually deliver on that, but it does get pretty close. Unless, as you've seen, it is busy doing something that takes a lot of resources. Defragging the Hard drives, or.... Windows likes to download or upload stuff while you "aren't busy" - because you have not touched your mouse or computer keyboard in a while (we need to make MIDI data activity mark the computer NOT IDLE! somehow), so you get Virus Scans, Windows Updates, Windows Telemetry (data being sent to Microsoft to report on how Windows is operating and if there are bugs to report - yeah, windows reports on itself). All of this takes resources away from Playground Sessions exactly when Playground Sessions needs them the most! There are guides to making your computer behave better, but they only go so far.