Teaching-you: Music Theory Skills review

Show me a person who doesn't find themselves tapping their toe to Girls Aloud, and I'll show you a fool with a heart of stone.

Everyone loves music - it's just that, well... when it comes to making music for yourself, there's so much theory involved. All that hieroglyphic notation, chord structures, inversions, harmonies... it's easy to get bogged down and forget why you were interested in the first place. No wonder so many kids give up on the idea.

Music Theory Skills aims to cover the theory required to pass theory Grades 1 to 5 - that's roughly equivalent to GCSE level. There's nothing to install: the software runs directly from the CD-ROM itself, which means the occasional pause as your PC readies the required files.

A session starts by asking you which grade you wish to study. Each grade is then broken down into consecutive lessons, but the full contents list is accessible at all times, enabling you to dip in and out of lessons, skipping stuff you already know. Lessons are also peppered with 'strange facts' to keep up kids' interest. Grade 1 starts with the real basics - staves, clefs, the lengths of notes - and gradually introduces keys and time signatures. The language used to explain them is fine for younger children, but teenagers might feel patronised by the description of a treble clef as "a wiggly thing on the stave", or the rather-too-jolly exhortation, "Yes, we can never get enough scales! Oh yummy yum! Mmm. Yes, more please!" - and that at the more advanced Grade 4 level.

Where appropriate, kids can try out their knowledge by clicking on the keys of an on-screen piano keyboard, but this is no substitute for trying things out on a real instrument. These on-screen exercises could come in handy for children who don't have day-to-day access to an instrument, but they're as 'interactive' as the program gets.

There's nothing terribly wrong with Music Theory Skills - it's just that, given the limited nature of its MIDI-based interactive exercises, there's really not much here that you can't get from a theory text book. And the fact that the program has to pause to access the PC's CD drive every time a new topic is introduced may leave more boisterous children impatient. That said, you might consider it worth a tenner for the musical dictionary and the facility to print out manuscript paper alone.