Smart Pianist - US Hack 3.2.0 + Redeem Codes

I use it with the Clavinova CSP-170.
The interface and menu navigation could be significantly improved. For example, once you have selected a song to play you need to press “song” to load it.. It is redundant and not intuitive to know “song” means load. It may seem like a slight annoyance but it is a frequent operation and not compatible with Apple’s logical way of navigating menus.
In terms of learning, it is lacking some crucial options to take advantage of the great piano features, like the follow lights are helpful but if you are trying to learn a small tricky section of a song there is no way to select a small portion of sheet music and repeat it so that you can dial in on the mechanics… instead you are forced to practice the song it is entirety, which is not efficient… sure you could use the small scroll bar to move forward but it is not precise and is tedious and not worth the effort.
It would be great to see an update… it would show that Yamaha is invested their products and not settling for good enough.

I just received a Yamaha Clavinova CSP-170 yesterday and was eager to try out this essential app to go with the piano. The app doesn’t disappoint as it unlocks features often found only in the higher-end and more expensive CVP Clavinova line. These include a wide variety of realistic instrumental voices, multi-track recording, and auto-accompaniment styles that analyze your playing to simulate a backup band or orchestra accompanying you. The most innovative feature is the app’s ability to take songs from your iPad’s music library and generate an interactive chord chart for you to play along with. While the chord analysis isn’t perfect, it is amazing how far the technology has come. When it does not analyze the harmonies correctly, I like how you can go in and easily edit the chart when you know the chord just isn’t right. These are all features found in Yamaha’s other Chord Tracker app, but Smart Pianist takes it to a whole new level by quickly generating a digital sheet music score that can be customized to the song’s style and pianist’s ability. It took some getting use to the instrument’s built-in Stream Lights, but this can be a very handy practice tool for users that need extra assistance in finding the correct keys to play. I commend Yamaha on putting together a winning combination of software and a fine musical instrument.

You want to download a classical piece to utilize the light guide feature and reduce the frustration caused by trying to map notes in musical notation to the keyboard and make the learning experience more pleasant? Well, you came to the wrong place. This app forces you to buy garbage content from MusicSoft site where there aren’t technically real classical pieces. In addition, it forces you to only use midi files to download from Dropbox or load them from your own local storage. And guess what? Whatever software you are using to export your piece to midi format this app will gladly shift the notes to the treble clef and leave the bass clef with just rest notes! All attempts have led me to this. Now, I get to see this nice piece of furniture for the next 20 months while seeing $200 dollars getting deducted from my bank account for a piano I am not using. I should have bought a mid end Roland portable digital piano and the hi light product from The One where at least I get access to the seek and fix these minor problems by myself.
Yamaha, if you care about your customers. Please fix this and I will gladly remove this review and leave a 5 stars one.

This is a nice app to complement your Yamaha keyboard. Ours is a p125. When connected we noticed we don’t get all of the songs such as the 50 popular and the all of the lessons. All we get is the 50 classics. That was disappointing as I was expecting them to be included. Wish we could unlock those.
There’s a bug with the tempo speed where it won’t stay to your selected tempo. It resets every time you press stop/play. Very annoying for iPhone users as the setting is hard to get to. Also you can’t adjust the tempo until you press play. Very odd behavior!
Overall the app has some cool features and worth downloading but wish and hope for more content and the tempo fix.
Finally worth noting that the cable was a hassle as you can’t simply use an adapter it’s your iPhone cable. You need something that is totally USB version 2.

I really like the versatility of the app and am becoming more familiar with it, but there isn’t an instruction guide or tutorial which shows how to make full use of all the features.
For instance, in the chord chart page when you are playing or recording a song, there are 1-4 different color designations for certain segments of a song. Red, brown, tan, and blue. There isn’t any explanation for this feature. Secondly, when importing songs from iTunes to play along with or get the chord chart for, many songs (50% or more) are not accessible thru the Yamaha app. Finally, there are some various menu items such as A@B which are not explained and they’re not user-figure-outable.
Nonetheless, I like the app. I don’t sight-read sheet music, but rather, I read chord charts and play melody by ear.
Great app for playing along with your favorite itunes songs. Just wish someone would explain the app or show me a user guide.
David

I have been using this app with my CSP-170 for the past 4 or 5 years. As a teacher, I record my student's solos, duets, and concertos. There have been a few issues over the years, but some good improvements have been made. I have hundreds of recordings saved. Last month all of a sudden the app crashed and won't open. I don't want to delete the app and reinstall it and lose everything. I was told by tech support that often when Apple has an update that Smart pianist will make an uodate and that I should wait for an update. Any idea when that will be? Right now I am unable to really use the piano for all those things I bought it for. The app works fine on my iPhone, but not on my ipad 5th generation. Please work on an update!

This app gives me a better interface for my clavinova 635. It’s actually pretty great having it on my iPad where my sheet music would go. A very simple enhancement that would make me give this 5 stars would be if any time you open the app (force quit then reopen) it automatically tries to connect to your instrument. As of now, it is so random if it will do it at all. It’s annoying going into settings and connecting to my piano if this doesn’t connect on its own. Make it so it connects on app startup every time and I’ll be a happy camper.

*UPDATE NOVEMBER 2022*

They released an update to this app that now syncs with your piano every time you open the app which was really an issue but they listened and fixed it so I changed from 3 stars to 5.

Overall, I absolutely love this app! It is truly revolutionary and I’m really excited to see what the future has in store for this app! However, when viewing the score on my iPad, I would love to be able to stand my iPad up vertically to view the entire page of sheet music, not just in landscape mode. Also, I wish I could swipe away the area for the volume, tempo, transpose, etc. section or swipe to make that section smaller so I can take advantage of the full screen of the iPad when viewing the sheet music, not just 70% to 80% of the iPad screen. Also, hopefully one day when uploading a song from my iTunes library, that it will also be able to load the melody for the score and not just the chords. But great job on this App!!

This app unlocks much of the potential of the Clavinovas.
Simple multitrack functionality combined with lots of great voices makes for awesome compositional potential.
Goodcustomer service to help a semi-ludite like me figure it out.
The small size and difficulty of expanding the song library for the light guided teaching function really limits this function’s usefulness solo, but a teacher can make a recording in MIDI to allow the student to follow the light guides as often as needed on their own. Unclear why notation isn't better integrated, but overall I am really happy about how much this app and piano have inspired me and my kids and that our piano doesn’t go out of tune here in coastal New England, where a real piano does so at least twice a year.

This latest release (3.1.0) had me redo the connection wizard via cable to my P-515 and after a number of trials, I was finally able to connect again, only to find out that the app crashes (quits) immediately when trying to play some songs from my Music Library, in chords mode. Those exact same songs played just fine in the previous release. What gives?

Update: shortly after I wrote the above, Yamaha published an update to the app that fixed the problem. I redid the song chord analysis for some songs and they are more accurate than before. Good! Update your copy to the latest revision for best results.