Drop the .mid file to learn it
bend
mod
C4
69 sounds, layers and keyboard splits, a real MIDI in and out with pitch bend, mod wheel and pedals, an arpeggiator, chords, a metronome, a learn mode and full screen performance view. Free, and it installs as an app.
Start typing notes, pick a sound, and go full screen when you are ready to perform.
Type on your computer keyboard: the bottom letter row Z to M and the top row Q to P are the white keys, and the row above each is the black keys. You can also click or touch the keys, or plug in a MIDI keyboard.
Open Sounds, search the 69 instruments or filter by family, and press one to hear it. The arrows beside the sound name, or the comma and full stop keys, step through the list.
Switch on a second part to layer two sounds, or a third part to split the keyboard, for example a bass in the left hand and a piano in the right. A Setup applies a ready-made combination in one click.
Press F or the full screen button. The keyboard fills the display and the controls fade away; L brings the sound list back as a drawer.
Pick a song and follow the falling notes, or press Record and play. Save the take as a MIDI file, an audio file, a video with sound, or a link.
Online Virtual Piano is a free piano you play in the browser with your computer keyboard, the mouse, a touch screen or a USB MIDI keyboard. This second generation has 69 sounds, layers and keyboard splits, three pedals with a pitch bend and mod wheel, an arpeggiator and chord modes, a metronome, a learn mode with falling notes, and recording to MIDI, audio, video or a link. It has a full screen view for playing on a laptop, a tablet or a phone held sideways. There is nothing to install, no account and no ads.
It is not a replacement for a weighted instrument, because a web page cannot give you the feel of a hammer action. What it does is remove everything between you and the sound: no cables, no software to set up, and the choice of a concert grand, a Rhodes, a church organ or a string section is one click away. The first-generation piano is still online, unchanged, if you prefer it.
A sampled concert grand, Rhodes, organs, guitars, strings, brass, woodwinds, synths and world instruments in eleven families.
Stack two sounds on every key, or give the left hand a bass of its own with a split point you can move.
Play with a USB keyboard with velocity, bend, mod wheel and pedals, or send your playing to a hardware synth.
The keyboard fills the display. Bars fade away while you play, and a drawer brings the sounds back.
Hold a chord and let it run in six patterns, or play whole chords and in-key triads from single keys.
Follow falling notes at your own tempo, wait for each note, or open any MIDI file.
Save a take as MIDI, WAV audio, a video with sound, or a link that plays it back.
A bottom sheet for the settings, touch velocity, and a keyboard that scrolls and zooms.
The sounds are sorted into eleven families: Pianos (six), Electric pianos (five), Keys and mallets (eleven, with celesta, vibraphone, marimba, tubular bells and a harp), Organs and reeds, Guitars and bass, Strings, Voices and pads, Brass, Woodwinds, Synth and World (sitar, banjo, koto, kalimba and steel drums). Search the list by name or use the family buttons.
The default Real Grand plays recordings of a Yamaha C5 concert grand from the free Salamander Grand Piano library, at three velocity layers, so a soft note and a hard note are different recordings. Most of the others are rendered from the General MIDI FluidR3 SoundFont (MIT licence), played back as recorded notes and stretched over the keyboard. Seven are modelled live with the Web Audio API and need no download: Concert Grand, Soft Felt, Bright Upright, Honky-Tonk, Electric Piano, Music Box and Harpsichord.
A sound loads the first time you pick it, usually in a second or two, and the list shows while it is loading. Sounds you have not used for a while are dropped from memory to keep a phone happy, and load again when you return to them. Sustaining sounds such as organs, strings and pads are looped, so they hold as long as the key is down. Picking a sound also sets a fitting amount of reverb, unless you switch that off under Effects.
The Sounds tab has three parts. Part 1 is the sound you play. Switch on part 2 and it plays at the same time, on every key, with its own volume, pan and octave: a string pad under a piano, or a Rhodes with a soft choir. Switch on part 3 and it plays only below the split point, so the left hand can have a bass while the right hand plays the piano. Move the split point with the Split at buttons in part 3, and the two zones are marked on the keys.
A setup remembers the parts, the split point and the effects together. Ten ready-made ones are included, such as Grand and Strings, Rhodes and Pad, Bass and Piano, Church Organ and Choir, Vibes and Harp, Funk Keys, Ballad, Lo-fi Keys, Cinema and Chiptune. Name your own and save it; it is kept in this browser. Under Effects you will find reverb in three rooms (room, hall and cathedral), chorus, an echo that follows the metronome tempo, and bass and treble controls.
Up to 30 notes can sound at once. If you go past that, the oldest and quietest notes fade out first, which you rarely hear. The limit keeps long pedalled passages and layered sounds from overloading the audio.
Press F or the full screen button and the page gives the whole display to the piano: a large keyboard, the falling notes and the rising colour above it, and a slim bar with the sound name and the main controls. After a few seconds without input the bars fade out and the cursor hides, so nothing is in the way. Move the mouse or touch the screen and they return. L slides the sound and settings list in as a drawer from the left, and Esc leaves full screen.
While you are in full screen the screen is kept awake in browsers that support it, so it will not dim in the middle of a piece. On a phone, turn it sideways: the keys use the full width and the settings stay in a sheet. If a browser does not allow the real full screen mode, the page fills the window as far as it can. iPhones only allow full screen for video, so on an iPhone the piano takes over the page but the browser bars remain; adding the page to the home screen hides them.
Open the MIDI tab, press Connect MIDI and allow access. Any class-compliant USB or Bluetooth MIDI keyboard or controller appears in the list. The piano understands notes with velocity, pitch bend, the mod wheel (CC1), channel volume (7), expression (11), pan (10), the sustain, sostenuto and soft pedals (64, 66, 67), reverb and chorus sends (91, 93), channel pressure, program change and all-notes-off. A program change picks the nearest matching sound, and you can switch that off. Choose which channel to listen on, and a velocity curve if your keyboard feels too stiff or too light.
The same tab can send MIDI out to a hardware synth or to a virtual MIDI port that a program on your computer listens to, with the channel of your choice. Switch off the internal sounds if you only want the synth to play. Web MIDI is a browser feature: it works in Chrome, Edge and Opera on a computer and on Android, and not in Safari or Firefox. A keyboard that is plugged in but does not show up usually needs the browser permission, or is held by another program such as a DAW.
On a piano, how hard you strike a key changes the tone as well as the loudness. From the computer keyboard, notes play at a medium-firm touch, which the Touch slider and the - and = keys move. With the mouse or a finger, the lower on the key you press, the harder the note. A MIDI keyboard sends its own velocity.
Three pedals are modelled. Sustain (Shift or Space) lets notes ring after you let go. Sostenuto (') holds only the notes that were down when you pressed it, so you can sustain a bass note and play over it. Soft (;) makes the next notes quieter and rounder. The wheels at the left of the keyboard bend the pitch and add vibrato; the bend range can be set from one semitone to an octave, and the bend springs back when you let go. Everything is recorded and saved in an exported MIDI file.
Press A and hold a few keys: the arpeggiator plays them one after another in the pattern you choose (up, down, up and down, as played, random or a chord pulse) over one to three octaves. Set the note length with Gate, add Swing, and use Latch to keep it running after you let go. It follows the metronome tempo, so it plays in time with the click and with a song.
Chord mode turns a single key into a whole chord: major, minor, seventh chords, sus, diminished, augmented, a power chord or octaves. The two In key modes build the triad or seventh chord of each scale degree from the scale you have picked, so you can play a chord progression on one finger, and the chord name is shown above the keys. Scale marks the notes of a key and scale on the keyboard (major, minor, harmonic minor, pentatonics, blues and the modes), and Snap to the scale moves any note you play outside it to the nearest one, which makes improvising hard to get wrong. Transpose moves everything up or down by up to an octave.
Pick one of ten public-domain songs on the Learn tab and the notes fall towards the keyboard, lighting each key as it lands. With Wait for me on, the song stops on each note until you play it, so a hard passage becomes something you work out rather than a race. Lower the tempo to 30 percent, get the fingers right, and speed it up. The songs are Für Elise, Ode to Joy, Moonlight Sonata, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Happy Birthday, Jingle Bells, Silent Night, Amazing Grace, Greensleeves and Scarborough Fair.
You can also open any MIDI file, or drop one on the keyboard. It loads as a song with falling notes. Choose which tracks you play yourself, such as the right hand or a single instrument, and the piano plays the rest. The file is read in your browser and is not uploaded. The metronome has tap tempo, 2/4, 3/4, 4/4 and 6/8, and an optional count-in of one bar before a song or a recording.
Press Enter or the red button, play, and press it again. A take can be played back and saved four ways: as a MIDI file (with pitch bend, the mod wheel and all three pedals, and the tempo of your metronome, so it lines up with the bars in a DAW), as a WAV audio file rendered with the sounds and effects you have now, faster than real time and levelled to just under full scale, as a video with sound that shows a keyboard and the notes as you played them, or as a link that plays your take back for whoever opens it.
A shared link holds the notes in its address, so it is long for a long take. Whoever opens it sends those notes to this site as part of the page request, and nothing else. Video uses your browser's recorder, so the file type depends on the browser. If a browser cannot record video, the button says so.
On a narrow screen the settings become a sheet that slides up from the bottom, and a bar of four buttons (Sounds, Sustain, Click and Record) stays within reach. The keyboard shows about as many keys as fit under your fingers; the plus and minus buttons below it make the keys bigger or smaller, and the overview strip scrolls through all 88. Touch velocity follows where on the key you press. Turn the phone sideways for the widest keyboard.
Browsers on phones keep audio quiet until you touch the page once. If the silent switch on an iPhone is on, the sound is muted by the system; switch it off or use headphones. Large sounds are loaded one at a time, and the page frees the ones you are not using when memory is short.
The piano is a progressive web app, which means the browser can install it like an app. Installed, it opens in its own window or from your home screen, without the address bar and without this page's guide around it, and it gets its own icon in your apps, dock or taskbar. It starts without a connection, so you can practise on a plane or in a room without Wi-Fi.
On Chrome and Edge on a computer, press Install at the top of the sound panel, or use the install icon at the right end of the address bar. On Android, open the menu and choose Install app. On an iPhone or iPad, open this page in Safari, tap Share and choose Add to Home Screen. In Safari on a Mac, choose File, then Add to Dock. Firefox on a computer cannot install web apps, but the piano works there as a normal tab.
Offline, the app itself always works, and so do the seven sounds that are modelled live. A recorded sound works offline once you have played it, because the browser then keeps its files. To have everything ready before you go, open the ⋯ menu, choose Install and offline and press Save all sounds: that downloads the 62 recorded sounds, about 57 MB, once. The same dialog removes them again. A MIDI keyboard, recording and every export work offline as well.
The app stores only its own files and the sounds. It checks for a newer version every time you open it while you are online, and nothing you play is stored or sent anywhere.
What you play stays in your browser. Here is every request the page makes. The sound files are fetched from this site when you pick a sound, and your browser may keep them in its cache. The page loads a font from Google Fonts and an anonymous, cookie-free page-view counter from SimpleAnalytics. It stores your settings, your setups and the theme in local storage. When you install the page, or choose to save sounds for offline use, a service worker keeps the page's own files and the sound files in the browser's cache storage, so that it can open without a connection; you can remove the sounds in the Install and offline dialog, or clear this site's data in your browser. It stores nothing else. Recordings, MIDI files you open and everything from a MIDI keyboard are processed in the browser and are not uploaded.
Credits: the Real Grand uses the Salamander Grand Piano by Alexander Holm, licensed CC BY 3.0. Most other sounds are rendered from the FluidR3 GM SoundFont by Frank Wen, MIT licence. The tool is free, with no account, no limits and no ads.
Z to M and Q to P play notes · ← → octave · Shift or Space sustain · ' sostenuto · ; soft pedal · [ ] transpose · - = touch · , . previous and next sound · A arpeggiator · K metronome · Enter record · F full screen · L settings · Esc close a dialog or leave full screen. Notes are read from the physical position of each key, so they land in the same place on QWERTY, QWERTZ and AZERTY keyboards; pick your layout under Play to change the letters printed on the keys. Ctrl, Alt and Cmd combinations are ignored, so a browser shortcut cannot fire in the middle of a piece.
Looking for something else? Try the hand tracking instrument, the chord chart generator or the chord pad with drums. Everything else is on the music tools page.