Online Virtual Piano — Play Piano Online With Your Keyboard

A free online piano you play with your computer keyboard

Online Virtual Piano is a free online piano that turns your computer keyboard into an instrument. Two rows of keys cover 2.4 octaves, there are 20 instruments including a recorded concert grand, and you can learn songs, practise with a metronome, record what you play and export it as MIDI or video. It runs in the browser on a laptop, desktop, tablet or phone. There is nothing to install, no account and no ads.

It is not a replacement for a weighted instrument. No web page can give you the feel of a hammer action under your fingers. What it does is remove everything between you and the notes: nothing to buy, tune or find space for, and a melody you want to try is a few seconds away.

How to play piano with your keyboard

This is sometimes called musical typing. The bottom letter row, Z X C V B N M, plays the white keys of the lower octave, and S D G H J above it are the black keys. The top letter row, Q to P, plays the octave above, with 2 3 5 6 7 9 0 as its black keys. That is 29 semitones without shifting. Use the octave buttons or the arrow keys to move the whole window; a cyan strip on the keyboard shows the part your computer keys reach.

The piano reads the physical position of each key, not the letter it types, so the notes land in the same place on QWERTY, QWERTZ and AZERTY keyboards. The Keyboard layout menu only changes the letters printed on the on-screen keys, including the accented characters on an AZERTY number row. Under Note names you can switch to fixed-do solfège (Do Ré Mi Fa Sol La Si). If your browser language is French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese or Romanian, that is picked for you on your first visit.

If some notes drop out when you press several keys at once, that is the keyboard hardware, not the page. Many membrane keyboards can only report a few keys at a time in one area (ghosting, or limited key rollover). A mechanical keyboard with N-key rollover or a MIDI keyboard does not have this limit.

A real sampled grand and 19 other instruments

The default Real Grand plays recordings of a Yamaha C5 concert grand from the free Salamander Grand Piano V3 library, sampled every three semitones at three velocity layers, so a soft note and a hard note are different recordings. Twelve more instruments come from the MIT-licensed FluidR3 GM SoundFont: Rhodes, FM electric piano, drawbar organ, accordion, strings, choir, a warm pad, clavinet, marimba, harp, brass and a saw lead. Each loads only when you pick it and is then cached by your browser. Sustaining sounds such as organ, strings and pads are looped, so they hold for as long as you keep the key down.

The other seven are modelled live with the Web Audio API and switch instantly: Concert Grand, Soft Felt, Bright Upright, Honky-Tonk, Electric Piano, Music Box and Harpsichord. Some of them behave in ways that sound odd until you know the instrument:

• Honky-Tonk sounds out of tune on purpose. Its twin strings are 15 cents apart, so each note beats and shimmers like a saloon or ragtime piano.
• Harpsichord plays at the same level however hard you press. A quill plucks the string with the same energy every time. That limit is why the piano was invented, first called gravicembalo col piano e forte, "harpsichord with soft and loud".
• Music Box sounds glassy because struck metal bars do not vibrate in whole-number harmonics. Its partials sit at about 1 : 2.76 : 5.40 : 8.93 times the fundamental, as on a real bar.
• Soft Felt is muted and intimate, Bright Upright is tight and punchy, and the modelled Electric Piano has a bell attack and tremolo.

Every voice was measured across the keyboard and trimmed to the Concert Grand's loudness, so switching instrument does not make a jump in level. Each instrument also sets the Room slider to a sensible amount of reverb (more for a felt piano, less for a bright upright). The slider moves so you can see it, and you can change it straight away.

Velocity, volume and why a piano sounds like a piano

Volume is one control for everything. Velocity is how hard a single note is struck, and on a piano it changes the tone as well as the level: a hard strike excites more upper partials and sounds bright and percussive, a soft one is round and dark. The modelled pianos follow that, and also copy string inharmonicity (partials that sit slightly sharp, the reason pianos are tuned with stretched octaves), a tone that mellows as it rings and a short hammer noise at the start of each note.

From the computer keyboard, notes play at a medium-firm touch. Use the Touch slider or tap - and = (the keys right of 0) to go softer and darker or harder and brighter while you play. Ctrl, Alt and Cmd combinations are ignored on purpose, so a browser shortcut can never fire in the middle of a piece. For continuous dynamics, connect a MIDI keyboard.

How long a note rings depends on where it is. Long bass strings ring for many seconds, the middle register less, and the shortest treble strings die away in a second or two. On an acoustic piano the top octave or so has no dampers for that reason, so high notes keep sounding after you let go. This piano does the same above about C6. Hold Shift or Space, or switch on Sustain, for the pedal; held notes ring on with a little extra resonance, as when the dampers lift on a real piano.

Up to 16 notes can sound at once. When you go past that, the oldest and quietest note fades out first, which you normally do not hear. The cap keeps long pedalled passages from overloading the audio and crackling.

Learn piano online with falling notes

Pick a song under Learn a song and the notes fall down the screen towards the keyboard, lighting each key as it lands. You do not need to read staff notation. With Wait for me on, the song stops on each note until you play it, so a hard bar becomes something you work out rather than a race. Lower the Tempo slider (30% to 160%), get the fingering under your hands, then speed it up again.

The ten songs are all in the public domain and arranged as single-line melodies: Für Elise, Ode to Joy, Moonlight Sonata, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Happy Birthday, Jingle Bells, Silent Night, Amazing Grace, Greensleeves and Scarborough Fair. If you have never played before, start with Twinkle Twinkle or Happy Birthday. Für Elise and Ode to Joy come next, because their opening phrases fit in one hand position.

You can also open a MIDI file with Open MIDI, or drop a .mid file on the piano. It loads as a song with falling notes. Under You play choose to just listen, play all notes, the right hand (middle C and up), the left hand (below middle C) or a single track, and the piano plays everything else. The file is read in your browser and not uploaded. When you play freely, the coloured columns rising from the keys are only a visualisation, tinted by pitch and sized by how hard you played.

Metronome, transpose and scale highlighting

Switch on ♩ Metronome in the bar above the keys, or press K. Set the tempo with − and +, type a BPM from 30 to 240 or tap it in, and choose 2/4, 3/4, 4/4 or 6/8. Count-in clicks one bar before a song or recording starts. If you record with the metronome on, the exported MIDI file uses the same tempo and time signature, so your playing lines up with the bars in a DAW.

Transpose (− / + or [ and ]) shifts everything up to an octave either way in semitones. You keep playing the same keys but they sound in the new key, which helps when you sing along or match another instrument. Note names follow the sounding pitch, and recordings are saved at the transposed pitch. Scale highlights a key and scale on the keyboard (major, minor, harmonic minor, major or minor pentatonic, blues, dorian or mixolydian): notes in the scale turn blue and the root purple, so you can improvise without hitting a wrong note.

Record piano online and export MIDI or video

Press Record, play, then press it again to stop. You can play the take back, download a .mid file, download a video or copy a share link. The sustain pedal is recorded too.

• MIDI file: a standard format 0 file at 480 ticks per quarter note, with the velocity you played and the sustain pedal as CC64. It holds notes, not sound, so it is tiny and plays with whatever instrument your software assigns. Open it in MuseScore to see it as sheet music, or in GarageBand, Logic, Ableton or FL Studio to quantise it or fix a wrong note.
• Video: the take is played back through the current instrument, room and pedal and saved as a 1280×720 video with sound, showing the 73-key keyboard lighting up. It records in real time, so keep the tab open and visible until it finishes. Chrome, Edge and Safari save MP4; Firefox saves WebM, which uploads to YouTube, Instagram or WhatsApp just as well.
• Share link: the whole performance, with your instrument and Room setting, is packed into the link itself. Browsers and chat apps limit how long a link can be, so a very long take tells you to use the MIDI download instead.

Anything you play here is yours to use, commercially too, with no watermark and no attribution needed. That covers your performance only: if you record a piece that is still under copyright, the composition is a separate matter.

Use a USB MIDI keyboard

Plug in a USB MIDI keyboard, click Connect MIDI and allow access when the browser asks. Notes arrive with real velocity, so the tone responds as it would on hardware, and there is no key-rollover limit. Web MIDI works in Chrome, Edge and Opera. Safari and Firefox do not support it, so use the computer keyboard or touch there.

On a phone or tablet

Tap the keys, or slide a finger across them for a glissando. Phones show only the 29 keys the computer keyboard would reach, so they stay big enough to tap. Fullscreen in landscape gives the widest keys. Touch, learn mode and recording all work; the typing features need a keyboard.

No sound or a delay?

Browsers block audio until you interact with a page, so the first click or key press starts the sound. If you still hear nothing, check that the tab is not muted and the Volume slider is up. Notes are generated the moment a key arrives, so any delay comes from your audio hardware and browser. Closing other audio apps, using wired instead of Bluetooth headphones, and using Chrome usually give the lowest latency. Bluetooth alone adds a delay the browser cannot remove.

Private, free and works offline

Nothing you play leaves your device. Notes are generated in your browser, recordings stay in memory until you export them, and there is no account and no tracking of what you play. Your settings (volume, room, touch, instrument, layout, note names, octave, labels, sustain, metronome and scale) are saved in your browser's local storage and come back next time; clearing your browser data resets them. Once the page and the Real Grand samples have loaded, the piano keeps working with the connection off, because the samples stay in the browser cache and every other sound is generated locally.

Keyboard shortcuts

Z–M and Q–P white keys · S D G H J and 2 3 5 6 7 9 0 black keys · ← / → octave · Shift or Space sustain · - / = softer or harder · [ / ] transpose · K metronome · L key labels · Esc exit fullscreen. Click ⛶ fullscreen or Enter Fullscreen to fill the screen; the keys stay playable there, on iPhone and iPad too.

More music tools

Play music with your hands and a webcam in the hand tracking instrument or the hand tracking chords, look up chord shapes in the chord chart generator, keep time with the online metronome, build a beat in Drum Loop Studio or make chiptune loops in 8-Bit Studio. All of them are listed on the music tools page.