Piano and guitar trainer

A practice partner for two instruments. Pick one of the built-in songs, a MIDI or MusicXML file of your own, or type a chord progression, and the page shows you what to play and listens to whether you played it. Everything — the sound, the pitch detection, the scoring — runs in the page.

How to use it

Choose Piano or Guitar at the top, and a song. The songs run from five-note tunes to Bach and Beethoven, in four levels; your best score shows as stars next to each one.
Press Play (or Space). There are three ways to go through a song:
- Watch plays it to you, with the keys lighting up or the frets marked as each note sounds.
- Wait for me stops at every note (or chord) until you play it — every note of a chord, in any order. Wrong notes are counted but the song still waits. This is the mode to learn a piece in.
- Play along keeps going at the tempo you set; a note counts if you hit it within 0.2 seconds, and the score says whether you tend to be early or late.
Slow it down with Tempo (25–150 %), turn on the Metronome, and use Loop to repeat a passage: A and B mark the start and end at the playhead, Loop bar takes the bar you’re in (press again to add the next one). Drag along the strip under the music to move around; ← and → step a bar.
When a song (or a pass of a loop) ends in Wait or Play-along mode you get an accuracy score, a timing score and up to three stars. The best for each song is kept under Your progress.

Piano

Notes fall onto a keyboard that is sized to the song’s range, coloured green for the right hand and blue for the left, with the suggested finger on each (1 is the thumb). Above it the same music scrolls by on a grand staff with the key signature, accidentals and finger numbers. Left, Right and Both hands choose what you practise; with Play the other part for me ticked the page plays the other hand quietly so you hear the whole thing.

The fingering for the built-in songs and for imported files is worked out by the page: it looks for the hand positions with the least stretching and the fewest thumb crossings (the stretch table is from Parncutt and others' 1997 fingering model). Scales come out the way teachers write them — 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 for C major in the right hand — but it’s a suggestion; use what suits your hand.

Ways to play:

A MIDI keyboard: press Connect MIDI keyboard. This uses Web MIDI, which Chrome, Edge, Opera and Firefox have and Safari does not. Untick Sound for my playing if your keyboard makes its own sound.
The computer keyboard: A W S E D F T G Y H U J K O L P ; ' are the white and black keys from middle C up; Z and X move them down or up an octave.
Mouse or touch on the on-screen keys, several fingers at once on a touch screen. On a phone, turn it sideways for a wider keyboard, or use Full screen.
The microphone, for an acoustic piano: it hears one note at a time (so it suits melodies, not chords), and by default any octave of the right note counts.

Guitar

Melody (tab) shows the tune as tablature and on a fretboard, with the fret to press and the finger to press it with. The strings and frets are chosen to keep your hand in one place — one finger per fret — and to move it as little as possible. Chords & strumming shows the current and the next chord as chord charts, the strumming (or picking) pattern with the beat you’re on, and the chord shape on the fretboard. Watch plays it with a plucked-string sound.

Set the tuning (standard, half a step down, drop D, DADGAD, open G, open D, drop C) and a capo. With a capo the chart shows the shape you actually make — capo 2, “G shape” for an A chord — and in other tunings the shapes are worked out for that tuning.

In Wait for me the microphone listens: single notes by their pitch, chords by which notes ring together (chroma). It works best in a quiet room with the guitar close to the microphone. If there’s no microphone, ✓ Played it (or Enter) moves on to the next chord. Tuner opens a small tuner for the strings of the chosen tuning, with reference notes to play; the full tuner covers other instruments.

Guitar lessons

Open chords — C, G, D, Em, Am, E, A and Dm, with a tip for each, a button to hear it and Check me, which ticks the chord when the microphone hears it ring cleanly.
Strumming patterns — from four downstrokes to the folk “D DU UDU” and a chuck, each with a button that loads it with G, C and D to play along to.
Chord-change drill — switch between two chords in time with a click for 30 seconds to two minutes and count the clean changes (heard by the microphone, or tapped with Space). Your best for each pair is kept.

Your own music

Open MIDI / MusicXML… (or drop a file on the page) reads a Standard MIDI File (.mid, .kar, .rmi), or MusicXML — uncompressed (.musicxml, .xml) or compressed (.mxl). For MIDI you choose which tracks to learn and which hand plays each, or split one track at a note; tempo changes are kept. For MusicXML a part with two staves becomes both hands, ties are joined and grace notes skipped; repeats are not expanded. Up to eight imports are kept in this browser.
Type a chord progression such as G D Em C ×4, (Am F C G) x2 or C:2 G:2 Am F to practise strumming or chord changes on any chords you like.
Save .mid writes the current song as a MIDI file, with the hands on separate tracks.

The songs

All the built-in tunes are in the public domain: traditional songs (Twinkle Twinkle, Frère Jacques, Greensleeves, Scarborough Fair, Amazing Grace, House of the Rising Sun and more), Gruber’s Silent Night, Pierpont’s Jingle Bells, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy and the opening of Für Elise, Petzold’s Minuet in G, Pachelbel’s Canon and the first bars of Bach’s Prelude in C. The left hands and chords are my own simple arrangements.

Related: the chords and scales reference, the MIDI monitor for checking what your keyboard sends, the audio oscilloscope to look at the sound, and acoustics for note frequencies.

Browser support

Works in current Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari, on phones and tablets too. Web MIDI is not in Safari (on Mac, iPhone or iPad); everything else works there. The microphone needs the page to be allowed to use it; nothing is recorded.

Privacy

Nothing leaves the browser. Files you open are read in the page, the microphone is analysed in the page and never recorded, and your progress, imported songs and settings are kept in this browser’s local storage. A share link carries only the song, the instrument and your settings (and a typed progression).