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Virtual piano

A piano you can play with a mouse, a touchscreen or your computer keyboard. Show one octave, two, or five; hold several keys for a chord; turn on sustain to let notes ring. On a computer, each hand gets one octave of keys. Swap hands changes the physical keyboard rows while keeping the same musical ranges with each hand.

Virtual piano

Range
Note names

Computer keyboard

Z – ,C3–C4
T – ]C4–C5
Showing C4 to C5
C4C5

Press a key to play. Hold several for a chord.

 

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Playing from the computer keyboard

The computer keyboard has two playing zones, one for each hand. Each covers the same C-to-C musical range wherever you move it. The controls above show the live key assignments and octaves; their coloured tags are repeated on the piano keys.

By default, Z starts the left-hand range at C3 and T starts the right-hand range at middle C. Swap hands exchanges their physical keyboard rows while preserving those same hand ranges. Move either range by octave with its buttons or labelled shortcuts, anywhere from C2 to C7.

Keys are matched by position, not by letter, so the shape is the same on AZERTY and QWERTZ keyboards; the piano shows your own keyboard’s letters where the browser reports them. Shortcuts with Cmd, Ctrl or Alt are left alone, and nothing plays while you are typing in the search box.

How much keyboard to show

Compact shows one octave, Standard two and Wide five, from C2 to C7. Compact and Standard move along the piano with the Lower and Higher buttons. Keys never shrink below a comfortable width: when a range does not fit the screen, the keyboard scrolls sideways instead. Whatever is on screen can be played by touch or mouse, and several fingers make a chord.

Finding your way around

With note names on C only, every C is labelled with its octave number; All names every key, black keys by both their sharp and flat names. Middle C is C4. The black keys come in groups of two and three, and C is always the white key just to the left of a group of two — which is how pianists find it without looking at labels.

From one key to the next, black or white, is a semitone. Twelve semitones make an octave, and the note an octave up has the same name at double the frequency. The semitones and tones lesson explains why E to F and B to C have no black key between them.

Play guitar or bass? On a fretboard each fret is the same semitone as one key here; the fretboard explorer and trainer shows every note on the neck and lets you practise finding them. And if you would rather blow than press, the virtual melodica is a keyboard you play by blowing into your phone.

Using it without a mouse

Tab moves to the keyboard, the arrow keys move between piano keys, and Enter or Space plays the one in focus for as long as you hold it. Each key is announced by its note name and octave. The range, note-name, octave and sustain controls are ordinary buttons.

The sound

The piano is a recording of a real Yamaha C5 grand — the Salamander Grand Piano by Alexander Holm, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Tomus uses 21 of its notes, retuned to equal temperament, shortened and compressed to about 1 MB. Nothing downloads until you play: the first key fetches its own note, the rest follow in the background, and your browser keeps them for next time and for every other tool on the site. If they cannot load, a simple synthesised tone plays the same note instead.

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