Online Virtual Piano — Play Piano Online With Your Keyboard

Press the letter keys. Two rows are mapped: the bottom row (Z X C V B N M) plays the lower octave with S D G H J as its black keys, and the QWERTY row (Q W E R T Y U I O P) plays the octave above with 2 3 5 6 7 9 0 as its black keys. You can also click with the mouse or tap on a touchscreen.

About 2.4 octaves — 29 semitones — across the two key rows. That is wide enough for most melodies and simple two-hand arrangements without touching the octave shift. The older version of this page mapped only 1.5 octaves, which meant constantly jumping octaves mid-phrase. The on-screen keyboard shows 73 keys (E1 to E7, the range of a 73-key stage piano); the cyan strip marks the part your computer keys reach, and the rest can be played with the mouse, touch or a MIDI keyboard. On phones only the typeable range is shown, so the keys stay big enough to tap.

Yes, and there is nothing to configure. The piano listens to the physical position of each key rather than the character it produces, so the note under your finger is identical on every layout. The layout selector only changes the letters drawn on the on-screen keys so they match your keycaps — including the accented characters AZERTY puts on the number row.

Yes. Under Keyboard, set Note names to Do Ré Mi and the keys and octave display switch to fixed-do solfège (Do Ré Mi Fa Sol La Si), as taught in French-, Italian-, Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking schools. If your browser language is one of those it is picked for you on your first visit; your choice is remembered after that.

Use the Octave − / + buttons or the ← / → arrow keys. The range your keyboard currently controls is marked with a cyan strip along the top of those keys, so you can always see where your hands sit on the instrument.

Yes. Hold Shift or the Space bar while playing, or switch on Sustain in the panel to latch it. Notes keep ringing and a little extra resonance is added, mirroring the way lifting the dampers on a real piano lets other strings vibrate in sympathy.

A computer key has no pressure sensor, so notes default to a medium-firm velocity. Use the Touch slider, or tap - and = (the two keys to the right of 0) while you play, to go softer and darker or harder and brighter — enough to shape a phrase. Ctrl, Alt and Cmd are deliberately ignored, so a browser shortcut like Ctrl+W can never fire in the middle of a piece. For continuous control, connect a MIDI keyboard.

That is your keyboard, not the page. Most membrane keyboards can only report a few simultaneous keypresses per region — a hardware limitation called ghosting or limited key rollover. Mechanical keyboards with N-key rollover do not have this problem, and neither does a connected MIDI keyboard.

When you play freely they are just a visualisation: each note throws up a coloured column above its key, tinted by pitch and sized by how hard you played. In learn mode the same lanes are reused to show notes descending towards the key you need to press next.

Yes. Tap the on-screen keys, and slide your finger across them to glissando. Fullscreen in landscape gives the most usable key width. There is no computer keyboard on a phone so the typing shortcuts do not apply, but touch, learn mode and recording all work normally.

Twenty, grouped like the sound menu on a keyboard. Pianos: Real Grand (a recorded Yamaha C5 with three velocity layers), Concert Grand, Soft Felt, Bright Upright and Honky-Tonk. Electric pianos: Rhodes, FM Electric Piano and a modelled Electric Piano. Organs & accordion: Drawbar Organ and Accordion. Strings, choir & pads: String Ensemble, Choir Pad and Warm Synth Pad. Keys, mallets & harp: Clavinet, Marimba, Concert Harp, Music Box and Harpsichord. Synth & brass: Brass Section and Saw Synth Lead. Recorded instruments load once, about 1 MB each, the first time you pick them.

Because it is, deliberately. A honky-tonk piano has its twin strings pulled about 15 cents apart, so each note plays two slightly different pitches at once. They drift in and out of phase, producing the shimmering beat that gives saloon and ragtime piano its character. This voice runs two detuned oscillator banks per partial to reproduce it.

That is historically correct, not a bug. A harpsichord plucks its strings with a quill, and a pluck releases the same energy no matter how firmly you press — which is precisely why the piano was invented, and why its original name was gravicembalo col piano e forte, "harpsichord with soft and loud". This voice ignores velocity to match. Every other instrument here responds to touch.

Because struck metal bars do not vibrate in whole-number harmonics the way strings do. A free bar's modes sit at roughly 1 : 2.76 : 5.40 : 8.93 times the fundamental, which is why bells and glockenspiels sound glassy and slightly clangorous instead of warm. That voice uses those real ratios rather than a harmonic series.

Yes, and not by ear. Each voice was rendered offline across five registers and its loudness measured, then trimmed to match the Concert Grand — that took a 17.9 dB spread down to about 1.2 dB, so switching instrument changes the tone without a jump in level. Headroom is set so even a hard four-note chord stays below full scale at maximum volume.

Each instrument suggests a sensible amount of space — a felt piano wants more, a bright upright wants less, a music box wants a lot. The slider moves visibly so it is obvious what happened, and you can override it immediately afterwards; your choice stays until you switch instrument again.

Yes, most of them. The default Real Grand plays recordings of a real Yamaha C5 concert grand from the free Salamander Grand Piano V3 library, sampled every three semitones at three velocities, so a soft note and a hard note are different recordings. Twelve more instruments — Rhodes, FM piano, organ, accordion, strings, choir, pads, clavinet, marimba, harp, brass and a synth lead — come from the free, MIT-licensed FluidR3 GM SoundFont, loudness-matched and, for sustaining sounds, looped seamlessly so held notes never run out. Each loads only when you pick it and is then cached by your browser. Seven further instruments are synthesised live with the Web Audio API.

Real Grand uses the Salamander Grand Piano V3 samples by Alexander Holm, licensed CC BY 3.0. Rhodes, FM piano, organ, accordion, strings, choir, pads, clavinet, marimba, harp, brass and synth lead use the FluidR3 GM SoundFont by Frank Wen (MIT licence).

That is intentional, and it is what a real piano does. On an acoustic piano the top octave has no dampers — very short strings lose their energy quickly by themselves, so fitting dampers there is pointless. Those notes therefore continue sounding after you release the key. This piano copies that behaviour above roughly C6.

Volume is one control over how loud everything is. Velocity is how hard a single note is struck, and on a piano it changes tone as well as level: a hard strike excites more upper partials and sounds brighter and more percussive, a soft one is rounder and darker. Because this instrument models that relationship, a MIDI keyboard gives genuinely different timbre across the dynamic range rather than just a louder note.

Yes, the Room slider. At zero you hear the raw instrument, which is useful for judging exactly what you are playing. Higher settings place the piano in a progressively larger, more reflective space. The reverb is a real convolution, generated in the browser from a synthetic impulse response, so it adds no download.

There is a 16-note polyphony limit. Each sounding note runs several oscillators, so without a cap a long pedalled passage would slowly saturate the audio thread and begin to crackle. When the limit is hit the oldest and quietest note is faded out first, which is normally inaudible.

Browsers block audio until you interact with the page, to stop sites making noise at you unprompted. The first click or keypress starts the engine. If you still hear nothing, check the tab is not muted and the volume slider is up.

Notes are generated the instant the key event arrives, so latency comes from your audio hardware and browser rather than this page. Closing other audio apps, using wired rather than Bluetooth headphones, and using Chrome usually give the lowest latency. Bluetooth alone adds 100–200 ms that nothing in a browser can remove.

Pick a song and the notes fall down the screen towards the keyboard, lighting up each key as it lands. Use the tempo slider to slow a tricky passage down. Turn on Wait for me and the song pauses on every note until you play it correctly, so you can work through a piece at your own pace instead of chasing the playback.

Ten melodies, all firmly in the public domain: Für Elise, Ode to Joy, Moonlight Sonata, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Happy Birthday, Jingle Bells, Silent Night, Amazing Grace, Greensleeves and Scarborough Fair. They are arranged as single-line melodies for learning, not as full concert arrangements.

Yes. Press Record, play, then Stop. You can replay the take, download it as a real .mid file, or copy a share link that reproduces the performance for anyone who opens it. The sustain pedal is captured as well, and the share link also carries your instrument and Room setting, so it sounds the way you played it.

A standard format 0 MIDI file at 480 ticks per quarter note and 120 BPM, containing note-on and note-off events with the velocity you played, plus sustain-pedal (CC64) events. It opens in GarageBand, Logic, Ableton, FL Studio, Reaper or MuseScore. A MIDI file carries notes, not audio, so it will play back through whichever instrument your software assigns — it will not sound like this page unless you point it at a piano.

The whole performance is packed into the link itself, so nothing is stored on a server — but browsers and chat apps limit URL length. Takes up to roughly 250 notes encode comfortably; beyond that you will be told to use the MIDI export instead, which has no limit.

Yes. After recording, press Download video (.mp4). The take is played back through the current instrument, room and sustain pedal, and saved as a 1280×720 video with the real sound: the 73-key keyboard lighting up and each note rising from its key. 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 plays everywhere and uploads to YouTube, Instagram or WhatsApp just the same. For editing in a DAW, use Download .mid instead.

Yes. Plug in a USB MIDI keyboard, click Connect MIDI and allow access when asked. Notes arrive with true velocity, so dynamics and timbre respond as they would on hardware. Web MIDI is supported in Chrome, Edge and Opera; Safari and Firefox do not implement it, so use the computer keyboard there.

Yes — what you play is yours, with no watermark and no attribution required. One caveat worth stating plainly: that covers your performance. If you record a piece that is still under copyright, the underlying composition is a separate question from the recording you just made.

Yes. Click Open MIDI or drop a .mid file on the piano. It loads as a song with falling notes. Under You play choose Listen only, All notes, Right hand, Left hand or a single track, and the piano plays everything else for you. With Wait for me on, the song pauses until you hit each of your notes, and the Tempo slider slows it down for practice. The file is read in your browser and never uploaded.

Yes. Switch on ♩ Metronome in the bar above the keys (or press K), set the tempo with − / +, type a BPM or use tap, and pick 2/4, 3/4, 4/4 or 6/8. Count-in clicks one bar before a song or a recording starts. If you record with the metronome on, the exported MIDI file uses the same tempo and time signature, so it lines up with the bar lines in a DAW.

Use Transpose − / + above the keys, or the [ and ] keys, to shift everything up to an octave either way in semitone steps. You keep playing the same keys, but they sound in the new key, which is handy for singing along or matching another instrument. Note names on the keys follow the sounding pitch, and recordings are saved at the transposed pitch.

Yes. Pick a key and a scale under Scale (major, minor, harmonic minor, major or minor pentatonic, blues, dorian or mixolydian). Every note in the scale is tinted blue and the root is marked purple, so you can improvise without hitting a wrong note. It follows the transpose setting as well.

No. Everything runs in your browser. Recordings stay in memory until you export them, settings are kept in your own browser's local storage, and no audio or performance data is ever sent to a server. There is no account and no tracking of what you play.

Yes — volume, reverb, touch, instrument, layout, note-name style (C D E or Do Ré Mi), octave, the label toggles and sustain are saved to your browser's local storage and restored next visit. Nothing leaves your device; clearing browser data resets everything to defaults.

Once the page and the Real Grand samples have loaded, yes — the samples stay in your browser cache and every other sound is generated locally, so you can keep playing with the connection off. Only the web font and the share-link feature touch the network.

Click the ⛶ fullscreen hint or the Enter Fullscreen button. Press Escape or the ✕ Exit button to leave. The keyboard stays fully playable in fullscreen, including on iPhone and iPad.

Completely free — no account, no ads, no watermark. It is one of the free browser-based tools at jasperbernaers.com. If it saved you some time, you can buy me a coffee, but it is never required.