Starting your music lessons this summer or just want to test out a grand piano without having to buy one? Check out Electronic Piano — a small half MB free program that turns your computer keyboard into a device to play a variety of musical instruments.

This is a simple single screen tool showing all the options and settings in same window along with displaying a musical keyboard and its key mapping with the PC keyboard.

First, select the instrument to be played in the 'Main Settings' frame. By default, this is set to 'Acoustic Grand Piano', and as the slider bar is moved to the right using the corner right arrow button, one can browse through long instrument list (over 100!), such as vibraphone, accordion, violin, harp, flute, sitar, banjo and different types of organs, guitars and drums. So there's plenty to choose from with realistic sounds depending upon instrument selected.

To play the basic keyboard, use the numeric row staring with a tilde and going on till the dash sign including digits one to nine. The row below numeric series, i.e. from Q to P is also used for the playing the instruments. One can play simple tunes like 'Happy Birthday' or other songs provided that their notations are available — or this can be searched from the internet.

Now if someone likes to experiment with multiple instruments at the same time, there's an option with the name of 'Channel' just besides the instrument selection. Press the right arrow at the end of 'Channel' slider bar to select 'Channel 2' and then select a new instrument using the main instrument selection bar. Note that going back to 'Channel 1', the previous instrument appears in the selection bar. In this way, multiple instruments can be assigned to different channels — up to seven channels, i.e. seven different musical instruments.

While playing, notice a voice slider bar just below the channel selection. By default this is set to '1', which means only first instrument would play. Slide this to increase it to '2' or up to '7' to create a fusion as it would play multiple instruments at the same time.

For advanced enthusiastic users, there's an option to set the chord settings just below the instrument panel. This allows octave setting and playing of one-note music or three-note music while providing options to change chord type and note selection. To add further interactivity, Electronic Piano has an option to play chords as guitar, and a 'Play only drums' option that converts entire PC keyboard into a drum set. There are 46 drum set items available in all, and by default a particular one is assigned to each of the keys. The list of drum items such as 'Bass Drum', 'Side Stick' etc., is displayed on screen while clicking over each of the keyboard map keys displayed allows altering the default item or changing the intensity of sound effect. This makes drumming real fun as it puts user in total control over an extensive drum set.

Along with Eclectic Piano, there's another free piano application that gets installed with the same setup — it's called MiniPiano. Accessible from the same program group, MiniPiano is a tiny program that allows rough and ready music playing with keyboard. And there are a few good online resources as well to help beginners getting acquainted with musical notations such as key naming and learning how to read music sheets. One such site is zebrakeys.com — with a virtual keyboard and free lessons among others. Take a look at 'Categories' section of this site that has got lessons, articles and sheet music links for an in-depth review of music playing.

Enjoy learning music this summer!