Reading: Music at home?

For every musician who plays an instrument, from drums to the lute, it's practice, practice and more practice. The same principle applies to composers and anyone else whose life is music. But our report from the U.S. says that these days, the Net is making it easier and more pleasant for all musicians: log on and all varieties of lessons, help and criticism are at your disposal, because today the Web is home to hundreds of music Courses with various types of piano lessons to personalized, interactive master classes.

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If it's lessons you are looking for, you ctiwill find that on the Net, instructional web sites have different degrees of sophistication just as real- life music teachers come in different shapes and sizes.

Some lessons on the Net are simple black and white pages; others offer full-color streaming. But the idea is this: you call up the site, click on the lesson you want, set the options you want (like tempo and sound), then begin to practice. When you are ready for evaluations, some sites allow you to plug into software for criticism and advice.

For example, at www.harmonicacountry.com ten simple lessons are offered to students of the harmonica; you can learn to play Kumbaya in half an hour. Take introductory guitar lessons on www.tonos.com, founded by Grammy Award winners Carole Bayer Sager, Kenneth (Babyface) Edmonds and David Foster. The guitar package is a basic course that promises to give the student enough abilities to play Midnight Special eventually. And it is not necessary that you download courses. Registered students just log in and play. For piano lessons, Sticky, an animated cartoon character, is your guide and teacher; 12 months of eight lessons cost $15.95. Lessons start with an introduction to the keyboard and note reading and end with instructions on the more difficult passages in Beethoven's masterpiece, Fuer Elise.

All guitarists will love WholeNote (www.whole-note.com), a site offering more than 900 lessons. Start with such elementary stuff as stringing your guitar and proceed to lessons on playing Stairway to Heaven or other classics with a blues- jazz twist. You can search the archives by style, member name, or ability level and the lessons include musical examples that can be adjusted by the student for tempo, type of guitar style, and number of times to repeat a particular section. Drummers too find lessons on the net at www.drumlesson.com, which offers video clips and MP3 streaming audio so you can investigate 50 basic drumbeats. For $9.95 you can purchase eight weeks of lessons. Founded by Kalani, who has performed with Kenny Loggins, Yanni, Barry Manilow and Dr. John, drumlesson.com is easy to navigate and lessons are provided in clear, detailed video, audio, text and graphics. Kalani says his online lessons are important supplements to private instruction. Some say the next best thing to live lessons is Mars Music's website. Mars Music is a U.S. chain of 46 stores that sell music equipment and in-store lessons. Now the company has entered the world of Net teaching with some amazing technology. On the Mars Music site, the software Learning2Play translates your efforts into MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface). The software is unusual, says Randy Kroll, a 40-year old database administrator in California who decided it was time to learn to play an instrument - he had played the recorder in elementary school, but couldn't read a note of music. I like being able to do it in the privacy of my own home and at my own pace, he says. MarsMusic lessons so far cover guitar and flute, but should soon be available for 15 instruments, including clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, trombone, piano and bass. Each level of lessons (5 lessons for each instrument) costs $11.95 for a year. Most music teachers say that online lessons are best when used as add-ons to face-to-face lessons, because a good teacher gives the student constant advice and an internal sense of how it feels and sounds. But as the saying goes, ‘practice makes perfect' so adding to real-life lessons with online practice can't hurt, can it?

Find the opposites of the following words:

easier:
start:

Purchase:

Teaching:

Check your answers here:

Easier: MORE DIFFICULT
Start: END 
Purchase: SELL
Teaching: Learning