For those who may have missed it, please pay a visit to http://www.masterclass.ws, where you can find several well known pianists offering masterclasses on much of the standard repertoire. The video files there are all available for downloading. Among them, besides myself, are Jorge Bolet, Jorg Demus, Anrdezj Wasowski and Margarita Fyodorova. Lots of good stuff there!

John Bell Young

John,

Are these free to download? If so, how big are the files?

They are not free, but probably the best deal you'll find on the internet for the kind of information you can cull there from some of the leading pianists on the planet, including Demus, Bolet, Achatz and Fyodorova. It's $3 per download, and the average file size is between 10-15 MB, available in both low and high resolution, about 15 minutes long. They are not studio quality videos, though a few, such as those of Wasowski and Demus, are. On the average a master class on a single work comprises 3 or 4 files.

Let me say that the reason we created this site was to provide such expert training from experienced and recognized professionals to anyone, anywhere. Unfortunately not everyone can afford to travel to New York or London and pay $250 an hour --which is what it would otherwise cost-- to work with an artist-teacher.

We got the idea when a talented 17 year old pianist from Peru bemoaned the fact that his family couldn't afford to send him to a top teacher in the states or in Europe, but that he was determined to learn as much as possible about music making in spite of the paucity of such teachers in his country.

Thus far, though it's a niche market of course, and a kind of esoteric thing, many people have benefitted from it, or so they tell me. At first, we set it up as a subscription service, but found that most people preferred to download one file at a time, at their leisure. So far, so good...

John Bell Young

[This message was edited by John Bell Young on September 20, 2003 at 02:49 PM.]

Can I purchase this even If I located in Italy? Do you accept money other than dollars?

Giovanni Fabrisio

[This message was edited by John Bell Young on September 22, 2003 at 03:27 AM.]

Yes, you can use a credit card. The amount will be automatically converted to dollars if you use Visa or any major card. Just order what you wish and you will be taken to a PayPal site where you can input the information.

John Bell Young

It has come to my attention that certain Spam prevention programs, such as SpamArrest, may compromise the ability of anyone who has such programs installed to gain access to my masterclass site after ordering. Evidently such programs, which relay your email to a remote server, interpret any commercially generated email as spam. So, though the site will accept your payment, the automatically generated email instructing you on how to download may not reach you through SpamArrest and like programs.

So, for those who have SpamArrest or a similar program, I recommend you disable it before ordering (though simply disabling it without cancelling the service, even if you restore your original email settings, as I discovered when I had it installed, will not neccessarily prevent your email from being re-routed.) If you don't wish to uninstall it, I have an alternative for delivering the video files to you once paid for.

John Bell Young

[This message was edited by John Bell Young on September 26, 2003 at 11:39 AM.]

You know, that brings up a good point. I had that darn thing installed for my kids and was trying to purchase some download music from another site. Wasn't letting me buy it. Blamed it on the site I was trying to buy from but now I know the reason.

Thanks.

Forrester "Mac" McNeil

I had the same thing happen to me. Now that we know a way around it, we can all buy John's MP3's!!

Mr. Young’s movies are packed with priceless information whether you’re working on the piece in question or not. Only one of the fourteen movies of his that I downloaded was on a piece I’m currently working on (Rachmaninoff G minor Prelude Op. 23) the rest were not, yet he instills a way of thinking which you can apply to any piano piece.

Many of us don’t have the time or the money to attend a masterclass in person and unless you’re recording the event, you won’t be retaining every single detail when the live session is over anyway. With these movie files, you can watch the entire movie or just some crucial part over and over again and I see this as a great learning advantage.

The audio-visual quality of the movies themselves while far from perfect, are sufficient for their purpose and at a price which is without doubt the best bargain you could hope for.

I have been telling a pianist friend of mine about Mr. Young’s masterclasses. I recently sent him a link to Mr. Young’s website http://www.masterclass.ws/ArtistLists/jby.htm
because he is giving a concert series in South America and the Scriabin etude in D# happens to be one of the pieces in his program and I wanted him to see have the opportunity to experience this ground-breaking teaching tool for himself.

Do you download this or is it streaming video we can watch repeatedely with a username/password?

Originally www.masterclass.ws was a monthly subscription service. But we discovered that most folks preferred to purchase one file at a time. However, the subscription page, which includes most (but not all!) of the video files, is still on line and can be accessed with a username and password. There are some 73 files there, which translates really into about 36 actual files of master classes and performances (as each is duplicated in high and low encoding, for low and high speed connections)

In addition to the individual files that will remain available at only $3 per file, I am also willing to make the entire subscription page available for a discounted price of $95. That way, you can just get in and download it all and look at them at your own leisure. What is *not* available on that page you will have to purchase separately on the pay-per-view section of the site, where you can buy an individual file for $3.

To see exactly which files are available on the subscription sector, simply click on "Existing Subscribers" on the home page, then on "Subscribers Page". This will bring you to a list of the artists on the site, and an itemization of their classes.

Anyone interested in gaining access this way, please write me at imca@tampabay.rr.com for details.

John Bell Young

[This message was edited by John Bell Young on October 07, 2003 at 01:23 PM.]