PaulM
Member
- 143
Having looked around the web and not found an answer may I ask Smartmusic users here if my experience is typical? I subscribed to Smartmusic yesterday and started using it for the first time this morning. I have been doing some of the easy sight reading exercises. These contain just crotchets and minims at a slow pace with no difficult fingerings. Taxing they are not.
What has surprised me is that according to the assessments my ability to play in time appears to be dreadful. I'm not sure if the distance between the note you should play and the red note the program thinks you've played is to scale; but if it is, then it thinks I'm a whole beat or more adrift. I simply couldn't believe I was playing so badly out of time, so I got my accomplished musician wife to act as adjudicator while I played an exercise. Her comment was "If I were an examiner and you played like that I'd probably give you close to full marks". Smartmusic scored that performance at 14%; it thought my rendition was full of timing errors.
So my query is - do other users find Smartmusic's timing tolerance to be ridiculously critical or wrong? If this happened on just one exercise I'd put it down to a quirk, but it seems to be true for all the sight reading tests I've done so far. Is it just me?
What has surprised me is that according to the assessments my ability to play in time appears to be dreadful. I'm not sure if the distance between the note you should play and the red note the program thinks you've played is to scale; but if it is, then it thinks I'm a whole beat or more adrift. I simply couldn't believe I was playing so badly out of time, so I got my accomplished musician wife to act as adjudicator while I played an exercise. Her comment was "If I were an examiner and you played like that I'd probably give you close to full marks". Smartmusic scored that performance at 14%; it thought my rendition was full of timing errors.
So my query is - do other users find Smartmusic's timing tolerance to be ridiculously critical or wrong? If this happened on just one exercise I'd put it down to a quirk, but it seems to be true for all the sight reading tests I've done so far. Is it just me?