Piano Marvel "Re-Level"
For the past few months or so, we have been undergoing a very exciting project at Piano Marvel. The end result is something that we believe will help all customers, regardless of their age, ability, or occupation. We call this project “Re-Level” because, originally, that was the main goal of this endeavor, but it is quickly turned into so much more. The project now has become somewhat of a quality control process for the roughly 25,000 songs and exercises we have in our library. As a company that has been around for over 10 years, we have gathered many different pieces and pedagogical books and methods: our goal with this project is to make sure that everything in Piano Marvel is correctly leveled with a correct and appropriate tempo.
The process of “Re-Leveling” involves just two people, Sean Slade and Josh Mills. Sean Slade, who got his BS in Piano Performance and Pedagogy studying under Paul Pollei, is the point man on this project who ultimately decides what level a song is and the appropriate speed that would be optimal for learning or reading it. Every song is opened by Sean who then reads through the piece and gives me his thoughts on its' difficulty and speed, whilst checking for other things like if the piece would be good in the SASR or if it has notation items we need to fix or add.
By meticulously going through almost every song in our vast piano music library, we hope to make the library an easy-to-navigate tool that will help you find repertoire pieces to learn that are at your correct level. As some of you long time PM customers may know, a couple of years back we switched over to a new leveling scale in the library. Instead of leveling the songs from one (being the easiest) to a ten (being the hardest), we switched over to a 1-18 scale. This project’s primary goal was to get everything in the library onto that new scale.
We hope to have this project done in the next few months where we can release all of the new difficulties we’ve been gathering at one time. We realized when we started this project that changing the levels as we went could’ve caused some major problems, so we opted to wait to release all the new difficulties until we have all of the items checked. We have, however, already been making changes to tempi and other items along the way, so you might see some of this material already in pieces you're currently working on or playing.
In conclusion, we are very excited to have this project being something we can focus on as we believe this will help all of our customers. If you have any questions or would just like to say hey, please feel free to email me at, “josh@pianomarvel.com” and I’ll be happy to help.
Thanks for being our customer,
Josh Mills
