Piano

The piano app is the richest of the four: a grand-staff trainer with per-hand filtering, a calibrated virtual keyboard, and a technique-exercise generator.

Key-range calibration

On first launch the app asks for your lowest and highest physical key. The virtual keyboard then matches your actual instrument — a 49-key controller shows 49 keys, not a phantom 88.

Hand selection

The two staves map to hands: treble = right, bass = left. The L / R / both toggle in the play controls:

• dims the inactive staff on the score,
• stops its notes from being expected (both for scoring and for practice pauses),
• and in practice mode, pauses only on the active hand’s notes.

The score view

• Sticky clef strip — clef, key and time signature stay pinned at the left edge while the score scrolls under the fixed cursor.
• Minimap — the thin strip on top shows measure boundaries, the playhead, and red markers where you played wrong notes this session. Click or drag it to seek.
• Virtual keyboard — expected keys glow (color-coded by hand), pressed keys light up, and key names are labeled.

ROLI light guide

With a ROLI Piano / LUMI Keys connected, the expected notes also light up on the hardware — per key, chords included, in your keyboard’s own colors — and for scale exercises the whole keyboard is painted in the exercise’s key (root + scale). Two device notes:

• The incoming-note lights show in every mode, but their brightness is fixed by the firmware — the rainbow mode (cycle with the power button) looks best, since its mid-brightness colors let the guide lights stand out.
• No setup needed: the guide activates automatically when a ROLI output is detected, in the browser and in the desktop app.
• Managed browsers: enterprise-policy Chrome installs can silently swallow outgoing MIDI even while the permission looks granted (the console shows the device and the sends, but nothing reaches it). If the lights stay dark on a work machine, use an unmanaged browser or the desktop app.

Accompaniment

Give a piece a recording to play along with: a backing track, a band, your teacher. Open 🎧 and choose Accompaniment → Add…, then pick the file. Anything your browser plays works: WAV, MP3, AAC/M4A, FLAC, OGG, Opus and more.

• Line it up once. The recording’s waveform fills the view, with the piece laid over it as a band, bar lines drawn in. Drag the band so bar 1 sits where the music starts, and drag its end so the piece lasts as long as the recording does (that sets the tempo). Zoom in on either end to be exact, or nudge it with the buttons or the arrow keys. ▶ Check plays the recording with a click on every beat of the piece, so you can hear whether they agree.
• It plays along in Rhythm mode, following play, pause, seeking and loops. The piece plays at the recording’s tempo, so the tempo slider is locked, and the metronome is quiet.
• The recording can be longer than the piece: an intro, an outro.
• It stays with the piece on this device: bundled, from the score server, or in an uploaded collection. A piece opened from a single local file keeps it for the session only. The song list marks pieces that have one with 🎶🗑, which deletes it.

Looping a passage

The minimap along the top of the score has a handle at each end. Drag them in to choose the bars you want to work on. They snap to bar lines, and the rest of the minimap darkens. In Rhythm and Practice those bars loop: at the end of the last bar the playhead jumps back to the start of the first, and practice mode waits for its notes again on every pass. Repeat signs in the piano’s blue mark the loop on the score. The start sign waits at the cursor while the loop runs, so you can always see where it began. The transport shows what is looping, ⟲ bars 5–8. Its ✕ (or a double-click on a handle) goes back to the whole piece. By ear, the same handles and the same ✕ choose the passage to learn.

Learn by ear

The By ear mode, beside Rhythm and Practice, trains you to hear a melody and play it without reading it. It works on any piece: the instrument plays a phrase, you play it back from memory, and every time you get it right it grows by one note.

• Nothing gives the answer away. The keyboard shows no targets, the ROLI lights stay dark, the other staff and everything ahead of you show as empty bars, laid out like the real ones. A note appears, properly engraved, only once you have played it.
• Pick the staff you are learning: Treble keeps the top line of each chord, Bass the bottom one.
• Pick the passage: drag the handles on the minimap to learn a few bars instead of the whole piece.
• Rhythm: hear the phrase as written, at the score’s tempo, or as even pulses, one note per beat, so only the pitches are left to listen for.
• Octave: exact register by default, or any octave of the right note for smaller keyboards.

Keys pressed while the phrase is playing are ignored. A wrong note stops the response at once — so the wrong interval doesn’t settle in — and shows how you are doing: pitch accuracy, how many notes you have retained by ear, and your longest streak. Then either retry the same phrase, with what you’ve learned still on the page, or restart from the first note with everything veiled. Play the whole melody in one go and the score is unveiled.

Scale generator

The song picker’s 🎼 Scale generator entry engraves technique exercises on the fly — no score files involved. Pick any major or minor key on a circle of fifths (natural, harmonic or melodic minors) and one of eleven forms: parallel and contrary motion, scales in thirds/sixths/tenths, scale triads, triad inversions, broken triads, tonic and dominant-seventh arpeggios, and cadences — in quarters, eighths, sixteenths or triplets, over 1–4 octaves, with optional repeats and engraved conservatory fingering.

Generated exercises play like any piece and keep their own stats per key/form. As a practice guide, the virtual keyboard grays out keys foreign to the exercise’s key (they stay playable):

Jazz licks

The song picker’s 🎷 Jazz licks entry has the 653 most common patterns of eminent jazz players, from the Jazzomat Research Project’s measurements of the Weimar Jazz Database — each with how it is usually played: its rhythm, the chords it goes over (lick #10 runs over Cm7 → F7 → B♭maj7), who played it most and first. The lick goes in the right hand; the left plays its chords, either

• as shells — root, third and seventh, held; or
• as arpeggios — eighth notes up root, fifth, seventh and tenth, all through each chord.

Filter the list by kind, shape, length or player; set the key on the circle of fifths and the rhythm (as played, or even quarters, eighths, triplets or sixteenths); play it in one key or round the circle of fourths. The same builder is on the saxophone.

The jazz licks collection in the library is the 50 most common, ready to play: round the circle from C, as the players played them, with shells in the left hand.