How to play the virtual piano
- Play a key. Click or tap the keys, press the letter keys of your computer keyboard, or connect a MIDI keyboard. On a touch screen you can play chords with several fingers and slide a finger across the keys for a glissando.
- Use the sustain pedal. Hold Space while you play, or click Sustain to keep it down until you click again. Notes then ring on after you let go of the keys, as they do on a real piano with the right pedal down.
- Change octave. The − and + buttons (or ← and →) move the computer keys down or up an octave. The range they play is shown between the buttons.
- Record. Press Record and play. The recording starts with your first note, so you can take your time, and ends when you press Stop. Play replays it, and each key lights as its note sounds.
- Save or share it. Download a MIDI file, a WAV audio file, or copy a link that opens this page with your recording ready to play.
The two computer keyboard layouts
Piano rows (the default) uses the two-row arrangement of FL Studio’s typing keyboard and of tracker software. The bottom letter row plays the white keys of one octave (Z is C, X is D, up to M for B), with the black keys on the row above (S, D, G, H, J). The top letter row does the same one octave higher, from Q for middle C, with its black keys on the number row. The keys are matched by their position, so this layout works the same on QWERTZ and AZERTY keyboards, and in Chrome and Edge the labels show the letters printed on your own keyboard.
Virtual Piano sheets is the layout of virtualpiano.net and the Roblox piano sheets. All 61 keys from C2 to C7 are on the keyboard at once: the number row and the three letter rows play the white keys from left to right (t is middle C), and holding Shift plays the black key just above, so T is C♯. A sheet like t y u is played exactly as written; letters in square brackets, such as [tu], are pressed together.
Practise a letter song sheet
Paste a sheet written in the Virtual Piano layout into Paste a song sheet and press Practise this sheet. The next key lights up on the piano and in the sheet, and the piano waits until you play it, from the computer keyboard, a click, a tap or a MIDI keyboard. For a chord in brackets, it waits until you have played every note of it. A wrong key flashes red; the counter and the bar above the keys show how far you are, and Restart takes you back to the first key.
Play it for me plays the sheet from the highlighted key, at slow, 75%, normal or fast speed, so you can hear how it should go, then hands the keys back to you. The rhythm comes from the spacing: letters written together are quick (half a beat), a space or a line break is one beat, and each | or - holds the note before it half a beat longer. While you practise, the rhythm doesn’t matter: the piano simply waits. A repeated letter needs a fresh press each time.
The − and + buttons move the whole sheet down or up an octave along with the keys. On a phone, where only 25 keys fit, the keyboard slides to the key the sheet waits for; a chord wider than the screen is played one note at a time, and the keyboard moves on to the next note of the chord after each one. Characters that aren’t keys, like titles or lyrics pasted along with the letters, are crossed out and skipped, and a note tells you which ones; the letters of a pasted title that are keys would play, so delete such lines. Share result beside the sheet copies a link that opens the sheet ready to practise.
To start with a tune you know, open one of the public domain songs, such as Ode to Joy or Für Elise. Their sheets were written for Meadow Tools from the melodies themselves, not copied from other sheet sites, and each page gives the sources for the song’s history.
Note labels
The Labels menu writes on the keys what helps you most: the computer key that plays each note, note names (C, D, E), note names with their octave (C4 is middle C, the key with the small dot), or fixed do-re-mi solfège, from Do for C up to Si for B, the names used in many European and Latin American classrooms. Black keys are named as sharps, so C♯ and D♭ share one key.
Recording, MIDI and WAV files
- MIDI keeps every note with its exact timing and velocity, and the sustain pedal as controller 64, at a tempo of 120 BPM. Open it in GarageBand, Logic, Ableton, FL Studio, MuseScore or any other music program to change the sound, fix a wrong note or turn it into sheet music.
- WAV is the recording as audio, rendered on your device with the same piano sound and room reverb you hear, with two and a half seconds for the last notes to ring out, and levelled to a peak of −1 dBFS.
- Share result: the notes themselves are packed into the link (about 7 characters of link per note), so nothing is stored on a server. Recordings of up to several hundred notes fit; for longer pieces, share the MIDI file.
To see which notes a recording contains, or check the keys of your MIDI keyboard for dead or weak keys first, use the MIDI tester. To turn a recording of a real instrument or your singing into MIDI, try audio to MIDI.
Tips and troubleshooting
- No sound? Check the tab isn’t muted and the volume slider is up. On iPhone and iPad, turn off Silent mode. The first sound needs a click, tap or key press, because browsers don’t start audio on their own.
- Notes cut out in chords: most computer keyboards can’t report more than three or four keys at a time. Use the screen or a MIDI keyboard for big chords.
- Playing feels late: Bluetooth headphones and speakers add a delay of their own. Wired headphones or built-in speakers respond fastest.
- The piano sounds simpler at first: the recorded piano (about 1.6 MB) loads in the background, and a synthesized piano fills in for any note that hasn’t arrived yet.
- Tuning: the piano is tuned to standard pitch, A4 = 440 Hz. To check another instrument against a single pitch, use the tone generator, and to find the tempo of a song you want to play along to, the BPM finder.
The piano sound is a set of recordings of a Kawai upright piano made by the FreePats project and dedicated to the public domain (CC0 1.0). Everything runs in your browser: what you play and record never leaves your device.