Your Instrument & MIDI
A MIDI keyboard, the computer keyboard or the on-screen piano — all three talk to this course. Connect yours and watch every key get recognised.
Three ways in
Every exercise in this course listens: it waits for the note it asked for, counts the wrong ones, and passes you when you play it right. It does not care where the notes come from, and there are three sources:
- A MIDI keyboard — any digital piano or controller with a USB cable. This is the real thing: full-size keys, velocity, a sustain pedal. Plug it in, press Connect MIDI below, allow the browser’s permission prompt once, and every key you press appears in the monitor.
- Your computer keyboard — the row A S D F G H J K is a white-key octave from C, W E T Y U are the black keys, O P continue upward, and Z / X shift down and up an octave. Good for reading and theory; too cramped for real piano technique, but always there.
- The on-screen piano — click, tap, or glide across it. Works on a phone. Fine for finding notes and checking answers.
MIDI: what actually travels down the cable
MIDI is a tiny 1983 protocol that every electronic instrument still speaks. It does not carry sound — it carries events: “key 60 went down with velocity 90”, “key 60 came up”, “the sustain pedal is down”. Key numbers run 0–127 with middle C = 60, one number per semitone, so C4 is 60, C♯4 is 61 and the A the orchestra tunes to is 69. Velocity (0–127) is how hard you struck the key. That is all the course needs, and it is why a €40 controller works exactly as well here as a concert grand with a sensor strip.
Sound: one source, not two
The course has its own synth so that every lab and exercise can sound without any hardware. If your keyboard makes its own sound, you will hear both — slightly out of time. Use the 🔊 / 🔇 toggle in the top bar to mute the app and let the instrument speak; the exercises keep listening. If your keyboard is silent (a plain controller), leave the app’s sound on.
A wired USB keyboard reaches the browser in a few milliseconds. Bluetooth MIDI adds 10–20 ms, which is still fine. What you must avoid is monitoring the app’s sound through Bluetooth headphones: 150–250 ms of delay makes every rhythm exercise feel wrong. Wired headphones or speakers, please.
Web MIDI works in Chrome, Edge, Opera and Firefox. Safari — on Mac and on every iPhone and iPad — does not implement it. The computer keyboard and the on-screen piano work everywhere, so nothing in the course is locked behind a cable.
The exercise below is the friendliest one in the course: play eight different keys, from whichever source you like, and you are set up.
🎹 Exercise — Hello, keyboard
Connect a MIDI keyboard if you have one, then play. Every note shows in the monitor with its source.
- Watch the velocity column — press softly, then hard.
- Try all three inputs: MIDI, the letter keys, the on-screen piano.
- Eight different keys and the lesson is done.
Computer keys: A–' are the white keys, W–P the black keys, Z / X shift the octave.