How PianoKite works

1. Connect your piano

Turn on Bluetooth on a digital piano and tap Connect piano in the app; there's no pairing in Android's settings. Pianos with a USB port for a computer connect with a USB OTG cable. Over MIDI the app hears every key, how hard you play it and the sustain pedal.

No MIDI? The app listens to any piano, acoustic included, through the microphone and recognises the notes on the phone itself, after a short sound check for your room and tuning. And the on-screen keys work with no piano at all. See which pianos work.

2. A score that flows

Every piece, from the library or a MIDI file you import, becomes a two-staff score: notes quantised to sixteenths, right hand on the treble staff and left on the bass (from the file's two tracks, or split at middle C), engraved with the Bravura music font. It scrolls past a fixed playhead as the music plays; drag it to scrub back to any bar.

Below the score, a keyboard zoomed to the piece's range shows what's coming. If a note is due and you haven't played it within a tenth of a second, its key lights in the hand's colour (blue for right, orange for left) with the note's name. Notation is generated from MIDI, so it's approximate: rests, beams, ties and triplets aren't drawn yet.

3. Practise at your pace

Choose Left, Both or Right: the hand you aren't practising is played by the app and dimmed, so you still hear the whole piece. Then choose a pace.

Wait mode stops the music at each note until you play it and follows you if you play ahead: the way to learn the notes. Play-along at 50, 75 or 100% starts after a count-in and keeps going, the way to learn the rhythm. Free is performance mode: start when you are ready, play at your own tempo and the music follows you. More in Wait mode explained.

4. Feedback on every bar

While you play, correct keys flash green and wrong ones red, and on the score hit notes turn green and missed notes red. Playing along, a note within 100 ms of the beat earns full credit, within 200 ms three quarters and within 300 ms half, times a speed factor (1 at 100%, 0.85 at 75%, 0.7 at 50%); each wrong note takes half a point off its bar. Wait mode proves the notes, not the rhythm, so it counts for half. One hand alone counts 80%.

Every bar and hand keeps its best credit, and they add up to a Learned % for the song and for each hand. 100% means both hands, full speed, on time.

5. A report and a plan after every run

When you stop, the run report shows how it went compared with your last comparable take: a bar-by-bar map (tap a bar to look at it), your tempo and dynamics bar by bar, what the app noticed, and the mistakes to review one by one. You can hear a passage as written or as you played it.

The practice plan picks out the trouble spots and how to fix each one, at a speed that climbs as the passage gets clean. Loop it right there. Spots you've fixed come back after growing gaps of days, so they stay fixed. Every take is kept to compare and replay, and can be exported as a MIDI file.

6. Your MIDI, made playable

MIDI files from notation software often have no pedal and every note at the same loudness. PianoKite adds a legato pedal, changed at each bar line, to files without pedal data, and brings the melody out over the accompaniment when all velocities are equal. Playback uses a sampled grand piano, the YDP Grand from FreePats (Yamaha Disklavier Pro samples, five velocity layers), with reverb; with a piano connected, the music can play on your piano instead.

Import any .mid file from your phone. The free plan plays the first 15 seconds of each import; try that with your own file on our home page. Need files? The guide to free, legal MIDI files lists good sources.

7. The Technique lab

Scales, arpeggios and five-finger patterns in every key, with the metronome, measured finger by finger: which fingers come early or late, which lean loud or soft, how even the run is, and whether you rush going up or down. A tempo ladder per exercise records how fast you can play it cleanly.

8. Lessons from the first note

The course is 53 five-minute lessons in 10 units, from finding Middle C to reading both clefs, chords, the pedal and real pieces. A band or a teacher duet plays under every exercise, and every step checks what you actually play. The first two units are free. See the lessons.

9. A library and your progress

The library has 2,153 public-domain pieces in levels 1 to 5, many in several versions from an easy arrangement to the original. Search by title or composer, or play a few notes and the app finds the tune. Search the pieces.

No account is needed. Sign in with Google or email to sync your songs and progress between devices; practice works offline and syncs later.