what’s about to sing your favorite opera arias with a digital accompaniment?

Internet is a fantastic territory where you can discover many a surprise! Followed on twitter by a new follower, I followed him back and I discovered a very interesting and original digital service called pianovoiceopera.com! Services allying digital and opera dimensions are not so numerous! pianovoiceopera.com is certainly one of the most useful I recently found. In a word, pianovoiceopera.com is a kind of “operatic karaoke”. It offers a singer to buy online mp3 record of a lot of piano accompaniments. Like this, any opera singer (amateur or professional) can practice and sing with a high quality Piano accompaniments !

Home page of www.pianovoiceopera.com

As both a digital marketer and an amateur lyric singer I thought this service incredible! Haven’t you dreamed to sing the vocal part of your favorite opera arias or songs with available piano accompaniments ? The founders of such a nice service come from the cradle of opera : Italia of course! Fabio and Andrea, the two Italian creators of the service have kindly accepted to give an interview to operadigital.com

Hello Fabio and Andrea ! Could you introduce yourself ?

Fabio & Andrea, cofunders of Pianovoiceopera.com

Fabio: “Hi everybody at OperaDigital.com, here is Fabio and I’m in Internet Marketing and e-commerce. I’m a musician too and I use to play many instruments: Piano, Keyboards, Ukulele, Bass Guitar. I’m a Baritone too and I love Opera, Verdi’s repertoire is my favorite ;). With Andrea, I’m a cofounder of PianoVoiceOpera.com. My main activities within the PianoVoiceOpera staff is to keep the website updated and I “take care” of our customers.”
Andrea: “Hi Ramzi, this is Andrea. I’m a professional Pianist and since about 20 years my job is to accompany opera singers. I started studying piano when I was very young. I’m specialized playing “Clavicembalo” and “Musica Antica” too. My role in PianoVoiceOpera is to keep every tracks done…well done ;) as well as I’m the PianoVoiceOpera Artistic Director.”

I summarised what is pianovoiceopera.com ? Could you precise its main features ?

piano accompaniment mp3 for opera singers

PianoVoiceOpera provides High Quality Piano Accompaniment Rehearsal Tracks for Opera Singers (amateurs or professionals). We do not deal other music genre but only Opera, Old Opera (Opera Antica), Chamber Music (Musica da Camera). We also offer piano accompaniments of the best didactic works for young opera singers. The stronger idea of our website is that we give the opportunity to everybody to place requests. It means that if you don’t find the tracks you are looking for, you can go to our request form and, without subscription, you can place your request. It’s a free service! Once the customer has placed his request, he has just to wait that the track is done and uploaded. Then he can buy it! At the moment we have more or less 50 requests in queue. We usually upload one track per week. So, is simple to understand how long it takes to get your track done! If the customer that placed the request doesn’t want to wait so long time, he can buy priority for his own requests. In this case the track is included in the “Request Priority” service price and it will be sent via email when ready. It’s possible to purchase three different priority solutions :
– “2 Weeks Priority” It means that you’ll get your track done in 2 weeks.
– “1 Week Priority” and the express service “36h Priority”.
– On pianovoiceopera.com you can also find a completely free section that includes a wide range of vocalizations (download or streaming) to heat the item. It’s also possible to download the public domain free scores of tracks available in our catalog.

Can you explain how did you have the idea to set up pianovoiceopera.com ?

Andrea: “It was 2009 and I was working for an important italian Opera Academy! We needed a bass for the role of Bartolo in Le Nozze di Figaro. After listening to several aspirants, we decided to choose Fabio for his beautiful voice, not knowing that as well as a good singer, we were also choosing a person with great internet skills! After the first academy period, Fabio asked me to record some tracks to study even in my
absence. I told him, ‘…why not!’ And Fabio asked me if I was willing to share this teaching aid to other people. My answer was ‘yes of course, what’s the problem!’ But I had no idea of what was growing in Fabio’s mind, and when he told me about to built a website, I was surprised! My technical skills in the Internet staff was very limited and I was hesitant. But Fabio was able to convince me to ….”
Fabio: “…Yes actually, after having personally tested the effectiveness of the piano accompaniment tracks made by Andrea and being a neat freak of the Internet, it did not take much to make 2+2. So I explained to Andrea about the potential of the project and, in less than no time, we started to work for the making of the project, I began to develop a first idea of website while Andrea ……”
Andrea: “I was a little bit ‘in panic’ because I was a good and professional pianist but with no experience about digital recording and staffs like that. So start to study all the tools that today help me to make every recording session. In the while I was building a list of arias titles to put in PianoVoiceOpera repertoire. It was an hard and long work! And so in November 2010 we were online .. I still remember the excitement for the first sold track!

What are the profile of the users of your services ? International ? Digital-oriented? Conservatory administration ?

Fabio: “PianoVoiceOpera tracks and services are certainly intended for all those who need a serious and handy didactic aid. Students just beginning as well as professionals and teachers, but also amateurs who want quality accompaniments.”
Andrea: “About quality, our slogan is: “PianoVoiceOpera, High Quality Piano Accompaniments for Opera Singers!” and that’s what it means:
– excellent digital audio quality.
– utmost care in ensuring an effective opportunity to sing on the tracks, giving to the singer a chance to take “breathe”.
– the study of the great performances with no irrespective to the opera tradition.
– diversification of the repertoire with more than 400 tracks! It allows to our customers to roam between styles, eras and different authors.
– extreme care about pianistic interpretation and musicality…”
Fabio: “…and everything is accessible at a low price respect the high quality offered. Our goal is to constantly raise our quality standards. Our customers come from all over the world and especially from the United States where we get the highest rate of sales. As obvious given the ease with which Americans use new technologies also for teaching issues. It’s clear! Our customers generally are digital-oriented. They regularly use the network and last generation devices to enjoy our services.”

What are your projects ? Have you planned new features for your service ?

PianoVoiceOpera will be launching mobile apps in 2014

Fabio: Certainly yes! We have just finished developing our affiliate program which will be officially launched in the next weeks. This will allow institutions such as conservatories, music schools, music academies, etc., to provide our services to their pupils exclusively, using their website or social networks channels. As if our piano accompaniments were sold directly by this institutions getting participation in the profits. We are sure will be a hit! We also are working on a application for Android and iOS to provide all services on mobile platforms.The release of this app is planned for the end of this year.

PianoVoiceOpera will launch a blog

Andrea: Recently, Fabio and Me were talking about how to provide additional educational support to our customers. The answer to this question is: BLOG! What about it?? You’ll discover it as soon as the blog will be ready ;) Sure! It’ll be a great help to all the ones who use our tracks to get practice. For ex: consider that in classical music as in the opera there’s no reference beat like in POP music or Rock etc…So it is very important to understand the agogics to properly follow the rhythm patterns
of the tracks (rallentandi, accelerandi, long suspensions, etc…). This is a small preview of the contents that will be available on the new PianoVoiceOpera blog.

As young entrepreneurs & musicians, do you think social networks help classical music to develop ?

Of course! Social networks are already widely contributing to the development of classical music and beyond. Being PianoVoiceOpera present from the beginning in the most important social networks, we had the opportunity to follow the all developments in terms of possibility that today the network offers to aspiring singers. It’s certainly important to be careful to evaluate the right resources. It’s not always quality that digital provides! Our commitment is to offer only impeccable services and high quality products, with professionalism, competence and honesty.

It’s time to say “Addio!”

Fabio & Andrea: Thank you Ramzi for the opportunity! And thank you every body to visit Opera-Digital.com and for reading our interview! See you soon on pianovoiceopera.com!

Ramzi from Opera-digital.com : Andrea and Fabio ! Grazie mille for your interview ! I remind your website www.pianovoiceopera.com
Your twitter account : @pianovoiceopera
your facebook page : www.facebook.com/PianoVoiceOperaPage
your Google+ fan page: google.com/+Pianovoiceopera

 “Pianovoiceopera.com : a piano accompaniment in a few clicks away” by Ramzi SAIDANI is under terms and conditions of the licence Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 France