A beginner-friendly piano trainer that turns practice into a game.
Plug a digital piano into your browser and Plinky guides you through a score — you read the notation, play it over MIDI, and it grades how you do. No piano handy? Play along on your computer keyboard or the on-screen piano instead. Everything runs in the browser; nothing is uploaded, and your scores stay on your device.
Open any score and Plinky renders it as real notation. Listen plays it back so you hear it first, lighting up each note as it sounds so your eye can follow along; Practice turns the same cursor into a note-by-note guide — read the note, play it, and the cursor advances, sounding back what you played. The staff scrolls to follow the cursor as you go, so a multi-line piece keeps up with you instead of making you scroll — and it stays in its own box so the keyboard below never hides the notes. On a phone — in either orientation — a compact focus strip sits right above the keys showing the bar you're playing, so the notes you need are never out of reach, and a one-tap full-screen mode strips the screen to a single score and the keyboard — which you can fold away for more notation if you're playing a real piano (and it keeps the screen awake while you play). You can also force a set number of bars per row for bigger, more readable notation on a small screen, or switch to treadmill reading — the piece laid out as one continuous line that scrolls under a fixed gaze as you play, so your eyes rest in one place. A wrong key flashes red; whether the correct key then lights up is your call — read the music unaided, get a nudge only after a slip, or always show the next note. Single notes, chords, and two-hand grand staffs all work the same. Turn on Keep going and a missed note no longer freezes you — playing the next one moves the score along, so one hand's slip never stops the other.
When you finish, the run is graded S–F from three things:
- Accuracy — how many notes you found cleanly.
- Timing — how evenly you held the rhythm. Practice is self-paced, so timing is judged against your own tempo — a steady run at any speed reads as in time, and only a note that breaks your pace counts as off. Tapping on a phone or computer keyboard can't be as precise as real keys, so those get a wider window.
- Flow — whether you kept moving like a musician rather than stopping to hunt.
A per-note strip and a tempo graph then show where you rushed or dragged, and you can race a ghost of your previous best — or a friend's run, shared by link — with a marker tracking along the staff. Once you clear a score it enters spaced repetition, resurfacing for review on a widening schedule so it actually sticks — a one-tap review session walks you through everything that's fading, and you can shelve anything you're not working on right now.
- Library — the catalogue: bundled scales, arpeggios, and familiar tunes like Twinkle, Twinkle and Ode to Joy, plus anything you import. Search, star, filter by kind, grade, or what's due now, and open one to practise. Each piece credits its licence and source — the public-domain catalogue is drawn from PDMX — linked from the play page.
- Daily challenge — one freshly generated phrase, the same for everyone that day, graded and shareable as a "Plinky #N" grid; play it whenever you like, with no streak to keep up. Once played, re-opening the day's challenge shows your result again. A Warm up tab drills unlimited fresh phrases to prepare for it.
- Compose — improvise freely and Plinky captures every note, sketching it onto a staff to share or export (see below).
- Any piece, three ways — open a score and a tab bar switches how you work it: Play (read, hear, and practise it), Ear (hear a two-bar phrase and play it back), or Fingering (choose a fingering for a two-bar window; each note lights green/amber/red as you go — with a symbol too, so it reads without colour, and you can fade it off — to show how the move flows, it's scored against the most economical fingering for your hand, the two bars you're on are highlighted in the full piece so you keep your place, and it's saved per piece so the fingering you work out is there when you come back).
- Your takes — after a run, save it as a take. Each piece keeps your last few: replay one and it plays back onto the staff in your own timing, download it as MIDI or MusicXML, or delete it. Your fastest complete take becomes the ghost you race next time.
- You — your one progress page: the grade you're at on the eight-grade ladder and what's left to reach the next, your skill rating, days practised and notes played, a slow-moving fingerprint of your Accuracy, Timing and Flow, and the pieces due for review — with a one-tap review session to refresh them. Each grade carries an optional About this grade note.
On the home page, a new player is welcomed by a gentle, dismissible discovery checklist that points out the app's corners — a guided tour where you land, never a gate on progress.
Play whatever you like — on a MIDI piano, your computer keys, or the on-screen keyboard — and Plinky records every note and sketches it onto a staff as you go. The playback is exactly what you played; the staff is an approximate sketch, snapped to a grid so it reads as notation, with simultaneous notes drawn as chords. Play along to the metronome with a one-bar count-in for a tidier rhythm, set a checkpoint to keep the good part and retry the tail, then share the take by link or download it as MIDI or MusicXML. Open a MIDI or MusicXML file back in to pick up where you left off on another device.
Every graded run can become a Wordle-style grid — three rows (Accuracy, Timing, Flow) across six moments in five colour bands, no numbers — to copy, post, or save as an image. The bands are the same A–F scale the run's grade uses, so a green cell means the same as a top grade. The daily challenge shares as Plinky N, so everyone compares the same run, and the You page shares your lifetime fingerprint.
Earned moments also surface their own milestone card on the run summary — your first S on a piece, reaching a new grade, or a flawless run — to share or save. Each appears at most once and never interrupts; it just waits beside your results.
Drag in a MusicXML file (.musicxml, .xml, or compressed .mxl) exported from
MuseScore, Sibelius, Finale, or Dorico, and it joins your catalogue — playable and
graded like any other, saved on your device. Preview the staff, set its grade and
details, then add it. Export your whole library as a pack to back it up or hand it to
a student.
- With a digital piano — connect it over USB or Bluetooth MIDI and click Connect MIDI; Plinky reconnects it automatically on your next visit. Web MIDI is available in Chrome, Edge, and Firefox on desktop and Android; Safari and iOS do not expose it, so use the keyboard fallback there.
- With your computer keyboard —
A S D F Gplays the left hand andH J K L ;the right, each a five-finger C–G position, with an octave shift to move around; remap any of these keys to your own layout in Settings. (Two-hand pieces span both staves, so a MIDI keyboard is the comfortable way to play those.) - With the on-screen piano — tap the keys shown under each score. On a wide-ranging piece the keyboard shows a moving window that follows the notes you're playing, so the keys never shrink to slivers; set its width — 1, 2 or 3 octaves, or the whole piece fixed — under More options. Handy on a phone or tablet with no MIDI or keyboard.
Every keyboard shows a small badge in its corner — a green tick the moment a MIDI piano is connected, a quiet plug otherwise — so you can see at a glance whether your instrument is hooked up.
Plinky installs from your browser like an app and works offline once loaded.
A single-page app built with React Router in SPA mode. Web MIDI delivers note input and Web Audio drives playback from one shared audio clock. OpenSheetMusicDisplay renders MusicXML, and Plinky walks its cursor to match the pitches under each position against what you play — the same engine behind every mode.
Plinky speaks 26 languages, and contributions are welcome — see TRANSLATING.md for how to add a translation. Untranslated strings fall back to English, so every language always works while it catches up.
The project builds with Node.js and npm:
npm install # install dependencies
npm run dev # start the dev server
npm run typecheck
npm test
npm run build # emit the static site to build/client
npm run scores # regenerate the bundled exercise scoresA pull request runs typecheck, tests, and a production build; merging to main
publishes the built site to https://plinky.fun.