1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a musical instrument practicing apparatus and method, and a machine readable medium containing program instructions for realizing such an apparatus and a method, and more particularly to an apparatus and a method suitable for practicing the guitar or the like musical instrument, in which a plurality of practice pieces of music are provided such that a desired one can be arbitrarily selected by the student and the musical score thereof is displayed together with instruction about the manner of manipulation on the instrument such as strokes against the strings and fret positions of the respective strings. The invention is applicable in various forms of electronic musical apparatuses such as an electronic musical instrument and a computer-system-configured music practicing apparatus.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Among the prior art apparatus for practicing a musical instrument such as a guitar, there has been a type which stores music piece data for automatic performances of plural pieces of music, renders an automatic musical performance of any selected piece from among the prepared plural pieces and exhibits on the display screen the musical score of the melody of the selected piece for practice. The musical score displayed in such a conventional apparatus is, for example, the one usually referred to as a tablature which includes indications as to the fret positions of the respective strings to depress.
With the apparatus of the above-mentioned conventional type, a student can conduct a practice of melody performance on the guitar reading a displayed tablature, and if preferred, also listeninventioning to the automatic performance of the practice piece of music. With such an apparatus, however, even if the student wants to practice the guitar playing in a desired fashion of practice such as an 8-beat rhythm study, the study piece of music displayed may not necessarily be the one suitable for the intended fashion of practice, thus an efficient practice may not be expected. Further, the conventional apparatuses are not equipped with a function of indicating particular manipulating manners including an up-stroke and a down-stroke, and the student will be perplexed which stroke to use for each tone rendition, which also will deteriorate the practice efficiency.