The Free Piano Practice App That Tells You What's Next

The piano skill tree in Music Practice has 32 nodes, and every one of them is a real prerequisite: you cannot reach a skill until the skills under it are actually learned. It starts before you have played a single note and ends with reading a lead sheet in real time and comping your first jazz change.

Find the keyboard, then sit right

The tree opens with Map the Keyboard, finding any note in under a second, and Posture & Arm Weight, so the first thing you learn is how to touch the instrument without tension, before a single scale.

Your first keys, by hand and by ear

C major is yours, G major (one sharp), F major (one flat), and A minor longing give you four home keys. Rhythm Foundation locks a steady pulse, The Echo starts real ear training, and Reading the Staff comes only after the first key is under your hands, not before.

Chords that move, and the pop formula

Chord Under Melody and Chord Inversions lead into Am to F, in time, a timed chord-change drill that gates The Pop Formula, the Am-F-C-G loop behind a large share of pop music. The Sustain Pedal and Left-Hand Accompaniment Patterns round out the hands, and Play a Whole Song closes the tier: one song, both hands, start to finish.

More keys, real jazz, real blues

D major, A major, E major, D minor, and E minor extend the key vocabulary. Read a Lead Sheet and ii-V-I (first jazz) are the two theory nodes for a learner who wants to go deep, and 12-Bar Blues gives you permission to play blues without asking.

Playing by ear, on purpose

The Echo grows into Put a Melody on the Keys and Pull a Song from a Recording: transcribing Happy Birthday and Ode to Joy first, then pulling a half-known pop song off a recording once the ear and the chord vocabulary can support it.

Open the app and it already knows what you should do tonight. The stand shows the one skill you are ready to learn next, the drill that teaches it, and how you will know you are done, instead of a menu of songs to pick from.

Technique drills use BPM laddering: you start under tempo, and the app only lets you step up once you have played a clean run at the current speed. The Am to F transition drill, for example, has a real target, roughly thirty clean changes a minute, before The Pop Formula becomes the next lesson.

Once a skill is learned it does not just sit there. Music Practice reviews it again at 1, 3, 7, and 14 days, so a scale or a chord change you learned three weeks ago comes back before you have had the chance to forget it, instead of quietly fading the moment you move on. Ear training respects the same honesty: it only quizzes intervals, chords, and progressions the tree has actually taught you, never material from a lesson you have not reached yet. And every musical term in a lesson, from inversion to legato, is tappable for a plain-language explanation, so nothing you read assumes vocabulary you do not have.

Most piano apps score how closely you played a reference performance, or reward you with streaks and stars for showing up. Neither one tells you what to practice or when you are actually ready for the next thing.

Music Practice does the opposite. There is no scoring against a reference recording and no streak to protect. Progress is a skill tree you can see laid out end to end, which skills you have learned, at what tempo, and the one thing to learn next. Miss a night and nothing resets. Come back after a month and the review queue tells you exactly which skills need a refresher before you move forward.

Music Practice runs entirely in your browser. There is no account to create, nothing to install, and no paywall behind a lesson. If you want your progress on a second device, an optional signed-in cloud sync is there, but it stays opt-in, never required.

The code is open source under MIT and lives at github.com/astraedus/piano. Built by one developer, Diven, for his own nightly practice, and released because a real piano curriculum should not need a subscription to exist.

Open the app and it will place you exactly where you left off, or at Map the Keyboard if this is night one. If you use it, even for five minutes, tell me what confused you or what you wished it did next. The repo is open and issues are welcome: github.com/astraedus/piano.