The Sound of Gold with guest Aaron Garner the creator of Piano Marvel

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0:51 Hi, welcome to the Sound of Gold. I'm so glad that you're here. And if you've been with us before, welcome back. And if you're new, welcome. I'm here in my home studio with my cat, Cali, and she likes to play piano two sometimes. Yeah. My focus for this show is all about music. It is all about keeping music alive and focusing on musicians, music teachers, music schools, music venues, and anything else that has to do with music, which is so much and other than being a radio show host, I am also a music teacher. I teach here in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, and I teach several different schools as well as private lessons. In addition to being a teacher, I am also a student. I continue to keep myself I don't not gonna say educated, but keep myself fresh, right, because the more I learn, the more I get to teach, and the more I learn about different perspectives and different ways of teaching how to play the piano. It not only makes me a better player, but it also makes me a better teacher, because then I get to show up for my students and always keep them not on their toes, but keep their interest.

2:12 I will say that I do teach live. However, when I take lessons, I take online lessons because of my busy schedule, and that works for me. I learn so much from online classes. However, as a teacher, I'm going to say, oh, it's better one on one. However, in the same paragraph, I'm going to say, it depends on your schedule. And if you really, really really want to learn how to play an instrument, don't think you don't have the time for it. You make the time. And there are so many schools in your community wherever you're tuning in from. Just google music class and you will find a local venue according to a busy schedule. I promise you if you go online and look for online music classes, you will find that as well. And I am so excited today to invite my guest Aaron Gerner from Piano Marvel to our show. And Aaron, are you with us? I am, I can hear you, yes, good good erin thank you so much for making the time today.

3:21 I know you have a busy, busy schedule and I've been following you for years. I make mention of your program to my students, not to take away from private lessons, but you are like the in addition to private lessons, like when kids are on vacation or kids are traveling, everybody has an iPad and they're able to log on, and so I just I'm always recommending you, and there's so much to say about your program before we get to that part. Though you and I were both musicians, we didn't start out here. We didn't start out playing like we play or teaching the way we teach. I will love for our listeners and myself included, to get a little bit of history of what's inspired you. Where did you start and how did you get to where you are now?

4:11 Well, Lisa, it's a it's a very interesting story because I was not going to be a musician. I was My first love was sports. I loved football above all other sports, and that's all I thought about when when I was young. But my mother she wanted me to be the violinist of the family. She had nine children, and each one of them was assigned a different instrument. She thought she was going to build an orchestra and should have built a baseball team. So I didn't really like the violin because I just didn't have patience for it. And my brother, he was the pianist, but he rode a motorcycle. He loved his motorcycle, and we would have to drive like twenty twenty five miles from one city all the way to another city to get to my orchestra lesson, and I would put me on the back of his motorcycle and strap my violin to my back and off we'd go. And remember sitting there and I just hated violin lessons. And then my brother actually died when on a motorcycle accident when I was ten years old. Sorry, and so I my mom just went fu teaching and quit went into a depression, and so I decided, I don't know why, but I decided to take up the piano. Okay, Remember I found a John Thompson book and I was

5:41 sitting on the piano, and so I just went through it in like a day and started the next book, and I got bored, so I went into Uh. I found a song for a lease, and I learned to play that one really fast and played it and somebody's like, hey, you're amazing. So I'm like, okay, I'll try my next song. So the next song I tried it was like Chopin's Revolutionary Issue. So I'm in six stupid, hard songs and no business doing it at all. But I didn't have any guidance or any teacher kind of figured out how to read notes on my own, so I was picking up really bad habits. But of course, so it was going to be a football player. It didn't matter. I'm just doing this for fun. But about the time when I was in high school, I had decided by then I was going to be a neurosurgeon. Okay, so going into that that was the career. But my mom was like, hey, you know, you're getting pretty good at piano. Maybe we should put you in a piano competition. So I entered this competition and I got destroyed. I think it was awful.

6:45 I played. I think it was a pathotique sonata. Okay, I love that piece. Judge just said, you know what, you have raw talent. I'm like, I've got raw talent. I think it was just you have no training whatsoever. This kid needs some help. But we couldn't afford lessons, and so the judge actually talked to one of the professors at the college there and said to be willing to pay or teach the student without any pay, and he agreed to. We couldn't afford it, and so we I think my mom did pay what she could afford whenever she could. But that year I won first place at state in an MT and a competition, and so I'm like, wow, maybe I like this thing. And I eventually ended up feeling like, okay, music is my calling. I prayed about it and just felt this really strong impression that I needed to go into music. And I was really mad about that, Like, mostly it is because I didn't think musicians can teachers make any money or pianists, and I grew up poor.

7:57 I didn't want to be poor the rest of my life. So I think I was I wanted something really hard that I thought was hard, and something that made a lot of money, and so I was That's my whole reason. I think. I just I was a neurosurgeon. But I did enjoy music and it was fun. And I applied for a scholarship into a college and I got a scholarship, and so I got to the college. And where did you go? Did you go to? I was? I was accepted at by U Provo, And so when I got there, I started studying with the professors there, and one of them, my main professor, said Hey, I want you to read this this music for me, this book.

8:40 And I'm like, can I have a week? He's like, what do you mean? I said, well, I can't just read it. I gotta I gotta figure out the notes and put it together and memorize it and then I'll play it for you next week. He's like, you mean you can't read. They forgot to ask me to site read before they gave me the scholarship. And I'm like, yeah, I didn't really have a traditional training of how to get into music, and so they took the scholarship away from me the next year and I'm like, oh, so immediately, I'm like my sight reading hurt me. Yeah, I feel crushed. Oh man, I started hiding it, which you would do obviously if it hurts you, you don't let people know you can't say reading. So I went back and I studied at a university where I first started because my professor there knew that I couldn't read. I mean, I won the competition, but I couldn't read, No big deal whatever, And so I studied with him and he put me in a collegiate competition and I won first place in the collegiate competition. I am getting ready to do a master's degree in piano, and so I start applying for different degrees across the country and one of the schools I applied to was the music school Releaseman. They said, come out and audition for us. I out there, got on a bus. It took three days. I was sitting on a bus from one city of all the way across the country. And I show up and there's four

10:11 hundred people applaying for two positions. No, so the first question they ask because they knew I could play, but they're like, so I read this and immediately I'm like, oh no, So they saw me attempt it and they're like next. So obviously I didn't get that that position there, and so I applied for another school and same thing happened. They said, right, oh, and so I got accepted into a school at USC in California, and that was to do film scoring because I had a passion for sure.

10:51 Yeah, I love that kind of stuff. Yeah, well another school in Colorado. See you boulder the audition, So come back in a couple of years when you can read better. Right again. And so the last school was unc okay, really Colorado. And you know, I'm getting used to these questions, and so they're about to ask me to sight read. Okay, I feel it coming, and I said, do you guys have a composition program? And they excited and completely forgot to ask me to sight read and just sidetrackeded and they gave me a big scholarship and I had a teaching assistantship there and it was great. I got into my master's and doctorate there by that it was kind of too late, and they're like, well, we don't know why you can't read. And I tried and tried to figure it out, but it became something that was a sore spot for me. And I'm like, when I teach, I am not going to have my students go through that same pain that I went through, I'm going to teach them how to read. And so I have become part of Piano Marvel was born of that problem where I was looking for a way to help students across the world learn to read better. Music literacy has been declining since nineteen sixties, has just been going down and down and down, and so I am looking for wiz that we can turn music literacy around.

12:25 And so one of the I guess one of the stories was when I didn't really tell you how I built piano mar role or how that came about. But I was in probably my masters. Hold that thought. I want to get back to that. I want to ask, So, when you were going through the journey out in the valley of playing and not site reading, did you play by ear? I had a very good ear, but I did not play by ear. I knew where every note lived on the grand staff. I just couldn't do it quickly, okay, And so I would read the notes figure it out. I could do rhythms, and I would listen to recordings, so I not how it should sound. But I also was good at math, and so I figured out where the notes should go and then I would just memorize them like that. So then I would just practice looking at my fingers, and my memory was really quick. I learned a piano concerto, sixty one page piano concerto in like twenty one days. Memorize all million notes whatever it is, right, So my memory became very good because that's how I learned.

13:35 My reading was very bad. Okay, So then so your journey inspired you to I'm assuming and please please interrupt me to do research into like, hey, I can't read the only one going through this, even though when we're going through stuff, we kind of feel like the only one in the world that's dealing with it because it's so painful, emotionally painful. On I think self esteem mostly, but I mean fill in my blanks here. You you when you took it upon yourself to help other people by learning from yourself what you weren't able. To do correct. Yeah, And that's and basically that's where what inspired me to help other people was what I was bad at, and I thought, I want to help people, you know, avoid that or make that their strength, and so that kind of became my strength. Because many teachers who never struggled with reading. Just assume their students figured out or not. They've they've never gone through the painful process of learning how to read, if you're not, just gifted and just pick it up naturally. So that became one of my strengths because I could analyze I've been there, I know what you're struggling with. I know how to help you. And so when I was teaching at the university, my assignment was to teach music majors who needed to get you know, they wanted their degree in music so they could go teach, but they had to get a

15:06 piano proficiency exam past and so they would have to play their scales and of course, and one of the things that I wanted to do was make sure that they read music when they left the school and they could sit out a piano and play the alto part or whatever they needed a company acquire. And so I started teaching, and I really did not like the books that we were using to teach from. They were boring, they moved quickly, they didn't produce good site readers, and I thought, so I started looking at Randy Fabors stuff and Bastion and hel Leonard and these books, and I'm like, I'm going to just start grabbing books and having them read easy stuff that's really fun, and i'd have them check the books out. They never did it. They're like uh.

15:54 And so I was pulling my hair out, thinking, you know, I get you guys to read. Let me just pass skill and pass this class and get it over with. So there were some technologies that were coming out that were really cool. Music case was when I stumbled across that showed there was like a rhythm game on there where you'd press the space bar. This was way back. You'd press the space bar and get your timing and you'd get like a scored off if your timing was wrong. And I thought, that's really cool. But is there a way to put notes behind it so you could play the notes, show you ones you got right in which ones you got wrong, and give you a score and make it like a video game type idea. Nobody had done it before. The technology didn't even exist, And so I approached a company and I said how much would this cost? Remember I'm a grad student right now, master student, and I think the first thing they said was, well, we'll take a look at it for two hundred thousand.

16:56 Oh well, there's no way a grad student can pay for some and like that, I'll let my big company handle it. And so I went through my my master's student and then my doctorate, and then after that I I was teaching and I decided to come back to it. I'm like, I saw a program that was doing something similar, and I thought, they're getting close. Maybe I'll ask them, right they would be willing to, and they said, you know, your idea is good, but there is no market for pianos pianos teachers. That hurts me mad because there is a market. It's my world like, and they're like, you know, there's just piano teachers everywhere. It's hard to the market to them and their students. So they said no. So I got mad. My wife and I decided to take a trip back to another company. Uh, and we asked them, is this possible for you guys to develop this? You guys have done some other things in the music realm, sure this is something new And they said, well, we think we might be able to do this. It'll be about six hundred thousand dollars out And so I don't know what was going through my wife's mind that we're sitting next to me, and I remember correctly, I looked at him and I said, we'll start next month. I'll have them. And I don't know if she swallowed her tongue said what are you going to tell a kid? Like?

18:24 How would cliance this thing? But she was very, very supportive, and she's like, Okay, I guess we're doing this. So we went home and I started talking to friends and I told them business idea and they're like, you need to put this on on paper and make a business proposal. And so I went through all that research, put together a proposal, and I came up with six hundred thousand dollars wonderful, and we went ahead, and you know, it's nineteen million dollars later is what it has cost us. Now, I didn't know what I was getting into, but I still had a passion to build this thing, and it was I didn't I did not know what I was getting into when I did it, but I never gave up because I saw a vision and I you know, it's been really fun to see it grow and to have the ability to dream something up. And now we have a thirty thirty person development team where I think seventeen full time developers where we can dream something up and have them go build it. And it's really fun to see that. And I have a passion and a dream that this we can have everybody on this planet be literate in music.

19:38 I love that. I love that idea. I have so many questions for you to start out though, for our listeners out there, can you can you? How would I say this? Will you please share with us? If you were the student logging on to Piano Marvel, what would you what could you expect like? If you're the student, could you expect in the website? What would you what would be like? Do you have different programs? Do you have like time values? Do you have note reading? Do you have different levels? Again a lot. From from the person who's never used piano Marvel. What does it do?

20:20 Yes? I have people ask me that question all the time. It's the one question that I have the hardest time. Like you would think I would be able to just this is what Piano Marvel is, this is what it does. It is so hard because we're a company that innovates so quickly on building new ideas to help learn learning to play the piano, that it's branching off into so many things that it does it's hard to say this is what it does. Okay, So now what I focus on is the site reading. Okay, I'm sorry. Yeah. So if somebody says, what does piano marvel? I say, well, it gives you feedback, instant feedback of an assessment which knows you played right and which ones you did wrong.

21:08 But we built something called the SASSER. It's the standard Assessment of sight reading, which we came out with the idea in two thousand and nine and then started marketing it. The idea was you could sit down and take a test, play a song, and it would grade you and tell you what your score is, and decide if you could get a go to a harder song, and then a harder song, and it would push you to your limit, and that that limit, it would tell you your site reading score. Is this specifically a concrete site reading store, which nobody's ever done before. Okay, I'll go into a room of musicians and I'll say how many of you sit read? Well, how many of you are bad at site reading? And half the time the people who said I'm bad at sight reading are better than the ones who said they're good at sight reading because there's no concrete assessment of saying, here's how well I read. And so that's what the Sassar Standard Assessment of Site Reading was designed to do, is to say, any pianist in the world to sit down, take the test, and it would tell them from one hundred to nineteen hundred what their site reading score is. So if somebody came into a college and said you need to be at a nine hundred, you can actually go in and just practice your reading in Piano Marvel. So you get up to nine hundred, then you know you're ready to go in and audition for that school. And so a lot of schools are actually taking the SASSER that Standard Assessment of Site Reading and saying we expect you to be at this level before you can come in or what place

22:41 you w in a class depending on your Sassar score. So that's one of the things that we've done with Piano Marvel. The other thing we've done so imagine a book like let's say you have a piano book and you've got song you're playing Mary had a little lamb learning how to do that, and then you go to the next song, play that what typically happens, and what I had done for my students is I would assign them two, three, four songs, and I say go home, practice them, come back, and then I'll listen to them. If they're good enough, I will sign it. Okay, I'll give you a smiley face and I'll write your name on it or initial or something, and then we'll move on to the next song. Listen to that, and I would pass it up for computer, pass it off for them.

23:27 And so, in fact, a computer can tell you if you've missed the note, if you've missed the rhythm. And this is where I was spending like eighty percent of my time spoon fitting students saying here's the rhythm, No, let me help you with that. Oh, here's the wrong notes. Oh this is wrong, that's wrong. Eighty percent of your time is just getting get into their fingers, and then the fun begins once they get let's say they're playing the song. You know, a piano teacher, it takes eighty percent of your time just to get to that point.

24:09 Then the fund begins to make it exciting. And so I thought, well, if I can get a computer to do what it does best, which just sit there and babysit and give feedback and it can sit and listen without getting tired, and then I can take that twenty percent of making it musical. So I do that full time. That's kind of what I had dreams is kind of separate the just the sitting and watching students practice from the musicality what humans do best, the artistry partner.

24:53 I love that. Now, for we are live, there are listeners out there that are watching us, and then there are listeners out there that are just listening. So for those listeners out there that are just listening, how can they reach you your program? How can they find you quickly? Okay, go to piano marvel dot com and everything should be self explanatory. All they have to do piano marvel dot com on the website and you can try a free account. Everything is written on there, there's videos that explain it all. It's pretty self explanatory. If you're interested in learning piano, then get on there. There's even a contact us at piano marvel dot com email. Just send an email to contact us at piano marvel dot com.

25:40 We have a great staff that will help if you have any technical problems or difficulties. That's one thing really nice about our company. We have Matt, so's that Josh. We've got a team that will help anybody who asks, Hey, how do I I'm trying this on my computer, I'm trying to get on my smartphone and I have this problem or I've got this question, even stuff like fingering, like I don't know how to do this fingering, And you know, our team will help you get through any of these questions that you have. It's a great tech support and support for any theory questions or anything you have. Awesome, thank you. So I want to talk a little bit more. We mentioned earlier, or we had conversation earlier about literacy, and I had actually a piano a few piano students earlier today and one of my older piano students.

26:35 We're working and for our listeners out there, if you play piano, you'll know there's the travel claft, the bass cleft, the right hand, the left hand, and if you play a different instrument, it's a little different. But we're focusing on the piano. So with my older student and I make it, I try and use analogies, and I try and be silly, and so what I've said to all of my students, and I mean to disrespect anybody again, I'm being silly. Right hand. If you write with your right hand, it's easy to read the music and play playing with the left hand. Even for left hand writers, the left hand is the slower child, is what I say. And so we need to give it a little bit more attention, a little bit more love, because it needs it learns just a little bit slower. And that's okay.

27:20 We're just gonna love it, love that left hand a little bit more so we can learn to play now. I was working with my student today and it somehow like I have this aha moment, and I thought, okay, first of all, and this wasn't just today, this has been my thing this past year. Let's focus first on the left hand with reading music, because because the left hand takes longer, let's give it that attention first. Because the right hand, once it knows, it knows, and it's just easier. So the brain has some way of having of taking a longer time to understand reading the notes.

28:03 It's almost like a coordination. And I'm wanting to understand and tap into this more. And maybe with your research you can share a little bit with our listeners, like that left hand learning to play the piano. No matter who it is, it's the slower child, and it's just the eye hand coordination. It just takes longer. What can you tell us about your studies? Oh, I love I love this because I've spent so many years developing right hand and left hand coordination and hand together coordination, and have gone through debates with many many teachers on the different theories out there. Panna Marble is really really designed well to help learn the coordination between the hands. Okay, I don't know if you're if you've ever heard this before, but they called the piano the genius instrument.

28:55 Okay, I love that brains. Are are up into two core cortexes, right, so you get the right and the left hemisphere, and these are combined in the middle by this this highway of information. This goes back and forth training right and left, and you're doing this with music all the time, and it's extremely extremely complex. Well, this corpus colossum is what's called the highway in between these two hemispheres. Did you know that that studying an instrument is by far the best way to develop the Corpus colossum. They haven't found any other thing that can develop it as fast and efficiently as studying an instrument, and particularly the piano because of the complexity. And most other instruments you've got one note and you've and you've got your fingers in one place and you just play along and it's very difficult. But when you combine that to piano through your hands play not just one place, but I can play any hire keyboard, it expands the complexity enormously. And so one day I was at a at a middle school. My students are actually they were. They were calling the kids with straight a's that come out, and they're like, all right, all the kids straight a's come out. And one kid, I'm like, hey,

30:25 that kid's my piano student. And they call the next kid. I'm like, that kids my piano student. The next one is my piano student. Like sixteen of the kids, nine of them were my piano students. I'm like, wow, that's really interesting. They were very straight A student. And I thought, either pana makes you smart or only smart kids can do piano. I don't know, I don't know what which which is true, but it does develop the brain especially piano, so so well that I feel like every buddy, everybody on the planet should really study it. For whatever you go into, it's going to help you with everything your brain development. Absolutely, it's a phenomenal thing. And piano Marvel goes into like studying the left hand and the right hand and systematically putting those things together so that it doesn't feel like this monumental task. We have something that we invented called the learn mode, where you go in and you slowly learn one hand at a time, and in just one section, it shows you to the red and green notes and it gives you a score, and then you just do it again and again until you get it and it all teachers tell their students practice slow, because if you practice slow, you will learn fast. Just listen. No, why don't students listen because they're impatient. They don't want

31:56 to go slow. It's boring, it's hard, it's too much. But if they would practice slow, if they were disciplined to go slow and get it right, they would learn so much faster. Anna Marvel is designed to do that in tiny sections wherever rewards you. When you get one hundred percent, then you move up a little faster, and then a little faster, and then pretty soon you have this section done really well with one hand. You do the same thing with the other hand, and then you put them together. And it's designed for professional practicing that takes usually college students like four years to learn how to practice professionally. It tricks them into learning right off the bat. With all this research that we put into this and the technology that we built to support it, it's pretty It's been a very very fun project.

32:44 A couple of things I want to ask and want to mention. I've been teaching over over twenty years and I've been playing since I was five, and so this is my life. I mean, I live and breathe. I mean, this is this is what I love to do, love to play, to teach and so and even myself I'm a student as well. I still like to take lessons. As you met heard earlier, I still love to learn being a teacher when I'm with my students, and I remind myself of this when I get to play student as well. When things get frustrating, stop kind of take a break and look at it from a different perspective, perspective and look at it like problem solving, like figur it out, like, don't get frustrated with it, just like stop and be like all right, let's let's take another approach at this. And I love Piano Marvel. It's very colorful and very interactive, and it works at each person's level, so you don't have to feel like, oh, I'm just a beginner or I'm so advanced, like it just works where you're at, so there's no there's nobody there to judge you, kind of like other than yourself. So for listeners out there, you had mentioned piano Marvel dot com is easy to connect with, and I also wanted to mention that I know as a piano teacher, I have students that lots of times pick hard pieces and they were like, oh, well I want to learn this piece,

34:14 And I'll say, okay, well let's find you an easier version to learn from and they're like, well, how long is it going to take me to learn it? So with Piano Marvel, with your teachings, what words of wisdom can you share with our listeners as far as how long it would take a piece to learn? And yes, start with an easier version, not the harder version. Yeah, that's actually very tricky. I don't know if piano Marvel has the answer for that. And that's one reason that having a piano teacher is super super valuable because the piano teacher can assess a student and say, this piece it's your personality and I know your ability to this song such your personality too, but it will kill you and you will quit music, even if it's their favorite song in the world, like they you know, it's their pop song that they love. You're like, I've seen students do it before. They're going to try it and it's going to kill them. They're going to quit. You have to get the right level with with that with that student, and you have to get the right piece for the student that's going to keep them motivated. It's that's maybe one of the hardest things about being a teacher is just like finding the right piece and that'll fit with students. And there's so many pieces out there that's as dangerous to learn as far as how long it takes a person to learn. That can also be very tricky. You know, I talked about the learn method that learns interesting. It has a section in piano level

35:48 where you can start, Let's say you're learning for a least Okay, the first part. It will say, okay, learn that left hand and to start there, and it gives you a percentage completion when you finish it, because you are now three percent complete learning the song. So if you spent five minutes doing that, you can do the math and say, oh, I'll be done by the end of next week. And so it does help you kind of get a feel for, wow, I'm learning this fastard than I thought I would because it breaks it up into learning sections. What I noticed it doesn't do is like sometimes students get stuck on that that are here, and they'll spend for forty minutes trying to figure out that pattern in their hand and they're like, I just can't coordinate my hand, and then they realize once they get it, the rest of the song is just a repeat of similar patterns, and so then they feel like, oh, it took me, I only got three percent of the way done and took me forty minutes and take me forever.

36:52 But they don't realize what's coming up next in the song is a lot of repetition, so even that can be misleading to then you need a piano teacher to say let me, let me show you what's coming up in the future, so you can, you know, feel that motivation if you see a student slipping in that motivation, and so I would I would highly highly recommend piano teacher or a parent who can be that guide and that motivation and you got to stick to it because learning piano is hard. And even even with piano Marvel that makes it fun. I guess what, it's still hard. It still work. Yeah, but the genius instrument and why it's so good on your brain is because it's hard. It's not like watching Netflix, which is really easy, and that's what everybody does.

37:39 And so we're just getting stupider. So well, we have a couple a few more minutes. I want to ask, Okay, I'm gonna refer to my my approach and then you can you can help me with this. So when I teach, I focus on Let's say one of my students is working on a hard piece and it's a five page piece. I like to focus on chunking, right, So all right, So let's say Bobby knows how to play the beginning like he doesn't even need to sheet music anymore. So I'll say a right, let's let's kind of leave that alone, and so let's fload to different areas of the song. If you have, you know, ten minutes a day, go sit at the piano and pick an area of chunking, just to practice out that song, almost like taking a puzzle apart. Just work on puzzle pieces and called which I call chunking, which in the music world is called chunking. So but leave the beginning alone because you already know that. And the more you play the beginning and you're so good at it, you're not gonna want to learn the rest of the song because you're just gonna get so frustrated because it's going to take longer than the rest. So how does piano marvel come along and say, okay, the beginning, you've got the beginning, let's focus on like your your challenging measures. Does it have a way because it's a computer, it's not the teacher.

39:04 Fact, this is what the piano marble is designed to do, is the chunking. We call it slicing. So slicing you go into a chop slicing or a mint slicing, and it does that. It takes every piece and once you finish it it goes to the next section and then the next section, so you're not just wasting time only working on the part you're good at. You're because you've already got the gold star on that one. And then it does a review, so it comes back to those those pieces and putting them all together. So it's really really amazing. How I would say, different piano teachers have told me, if you're learning a piece, this makes helps you learn it four to five times faster than if you don't have that chunking system that Piano Marble has with the interactive assessment. And so once you get the golden star or that golden you get one hundred percent, it gives you a little star that's gold. Once you get that and you move on to the next thing.

40:04 That keeps you from just sticking around just doing the same thing over and over, and you move on to the next part. Next part, next part, right, And that's I mean, that's what I tell my students. I'm like, there's a difference between practice and performance. If you're going to practice, you're practicing parts of the song. You don't always want to sit at the piano and just play beginning to the part where you get frustrated, and then you're like, all right, I'm done for today. You want to focus on the different areas that are more challenging to smooth them out. And I've done some studying myself where they've said, I please, I'm open to your feedback. But some of the studying I've done is your brain doesn't when you're chunking and when you're like going to page five and then jump into page three, your brain is not looking for the order of it. Like you can memorize the beginning and in your mind you might know how popular song goes that you're playing, but when you're practicing it, your brain doesn't need to know that because it's am I making sense?

41:07 Could you? Yeah? Because I've spent thousands and thousands of hours practicing and teaching, and so I've I understand you know, the mechanics that go behind it. What we try to do with piano Marvel is we take all that research and we build it in so it's so you don't have to know all the research. It just feeds you the next thing in the order that makes your body learn the song, so that when you finish through this learning mode, you can go through and play through the song seamlessly without any problem. It's it's fascinating to like all the research that that goes behind the scenes inside it.

41:50 Yeah, and so it's pianomarvel dot com. And what I also love about your program is that you don't need a book, you don't need papers. As a music teacher, I have so many songs, songs and so many books that yeah, I'm thankful for them, but it's it takes up space. So I personally do like the paper. I usually print the songs that I'm learning. Yeah, I do too, which we do. Allow the printing of music, okay, except for on pop songs. You have to actually pay extra for the pop songs because we have a contract with Helenoard and Alfred and all the music publishers. Okay, So we have again just a couple of minutes left.

42:33 Are there any words or any any advice or short story that you'd like to share with our listeners that have been with us today learning more about piano Marvel. I do have something to ask, and I applaud you because you are a music advocate. The music helps our mind, our bodies. Every career we go into music just builds us and is enjoyable, it's hard, and so sometimes it's not funded in schools, they'll cut the music program not understanding what they're doing. Like, so anybody who's listening, please be a music advocate and help others understand how powerful that studying music really is in every aspect of our life.

43:24 It's so true, so true, and it's it developed so many disciplinary how would you say it? It just helps form so much in other areas of our life, like you said, and discipline is one of them. It just helps structure your your thinking, your your way of being. And as a musician, it's just I don't know why why anybody wouldn't would you want to learn a music instrument, especially piano because it's black and white, it's easy to look at where your your your neck is kind of like tilted. So it's just the piano, if I could be partial, it's the piano to learn on. As you know, Eric, thank you so much for being on the show today.

44:15 Thanks Lisa. Yeah, and I will continue to rave about piano marvel and share that with my students, and thank you. I think I might take a gander back into it myself and and go. Get your site reading tests see what see what your SEIT reading score is. Yeah, a little complex, But this year. I'm going to take it every single week and I'm going to pass twelve hundred this year. That's my goal. Okay, yeah, I'm gonna I'm going to go on there and I might, like I said, I might have. Your first day. Then just know you're better than me. Well I don't know about but thank you eron and we'll keep in touch. And if there's anything you else you want to share with me, thank you email and I'll be more than happy to help promote and to keep you guys, you know, to keep all musicians and all music a lot. That's my purpose here is that we got to keep this going because this is what's real, not AI, not not you know. AI is great for a lot of things, I guess, but but you you can't a human. You can have the instrument, but without the human being bringing it to life, it doesn't there's no life.

45:29 In it, and it doesn't feed. It doesn't feed the soul to just watch a computer work. What feeds the soul is us developing ourselves and watching our children develop their talents. Yes, it's it's an investment that keeps on giving. Yes, thank you so much, Aaron, thank you well, take care, Guye. Thank you so much for tuning in today. And we had Aaron Garner on from Piano Marvel pianomarvel dot com. Check it out. It is a great program. There's a from what I remember, there was a thirty day free trial to check out and kind of see what it's all about. And no matter where you are in the world, you can find it online. And in the meantime, I'm going to play a little bit here and just want to remind you that the reason I do this again is help me keep music alive because music is beautiful.

46:30 It's all around us. I mean really, sound is vibration, it's energy, and we all vibrate from energy. The more we tap into sound and vibration, higher our well being is. I look forward to next week's show. Tune in you can find out who my guest is. Thanks that for next week.

47:35 Thank you for being here with me today. I'm glad you are here.