See every note
fall into place

How the Piano Roll changes your practice

The piano roll — often called the "Synthesia view" — is the single most powerful visual tool in modern piano learning. Instead of decoding staff notation, you see the actual keys you need to press and the exact moment to press them. For self-taught players, beginners, and anyone learning by ear, it removes a huge translation layer and lets you focus on playing.

What you're looking at

Notes fall from the top of the screen and land on the piano keys below. The height of each bar is the note's length — tall bars are held longer. Colours tell you which hand to use: red for the right hand, blue for the left. When a bar reaches the bottom glowing hit-line, that key lights up and you hear the note.

How to actually learn a song with this

• Start with Tempo at 50%. Half-speed playback lets your eyes catch up to what your hands need to do.
• Turn on Note Labels if you're still memorizing where notes live on the piano.
• Use Loop on a tricky 8-bar section — repetition is how muscle memory forms.
• Mute the right hand Track and drill the left-hand part alone, then swap.
• Use Transpose to move songs into keys that fit your voice or skill level.
• When you can play the whole thing at 50%, crank tempo up in small steps — 60%, 70%, 80% — until you're at full speed.

Getting MIDI files to load

Any .mid or .midi file works. Thousands of free, accurate classical and pop MIDIs are available on sites like BitMidi, FreeMidi, and the MuseScore community. If you've arranged something yourself in a DAW or a notation app, export it as MIDI and drop it in here.

What about MP3 and WAV files?

You can drop in .mp3, .wav, .ogg, .m4a, or .flac files and the tool will switch into Audio Mode — the falling-note view is replaced by a waveform, and you get full playback controls (play, pause, seek, tempo, volume). Tapping the piano keys still works so you can play along with the recording.

Why no falling notes for audio? MIDI files contain exact note-by-note instructions. MP3 and WAV are just recorded sound waves with no note information inside them. Extracting notes from an audio recording — "audio transcription" — is a genuinely hard machine-learning problem, especially for piano with chords and sustain. If you want true falling-note visualization of a recording, convert it to MIDI first using Spotify's free Basic Pitch tool, then upload the resulting MIDI here. Basic Pitch works best on clean solo piano audio.

One caveat on Audio Mode's tempo slider: changing speed will also shift pitch (the way a vinyl record does when you change RPM). That's a deliberate trade-off — doing pitch-independent time-stretching in the browser is possible but adds noticeable audio artifacts. If you need real pitch-preserving slowdown, drop your audio into a dedicated DAW or a tool like Anytune.

Power move: Pair this tool with the Piano Modes Lab to understand why a piece sounds the way it does, then drop it back here to drill your fingers.