Online Piano Keyboard is an independent website that puts a complete piano in your browser: all 88 keys from A0 to C8, a recorded grand piano sound, and the tools people usually want next — a chord finder, scales, easy songs with a practice mode, and short lessons for beginners. It is free, there is no account, and there is nothing to install.
Why it exists
Plenty of people want to press a few piano keys right now. A student needs to find middle C for homework. A parent wants to check whether a child enjoys playing before buying a keyboard. A songwriter wants to hear a chord. Someone has a MIDI keyboard in a closet and no software for it. Most online pianos cover one of those needs and get in the way of the others with small keys, thin sound or ads inside the instrument. This site tries to do the basics properly: a real piano recording, a sensible computer-keyboard layout, MIDI support, and room to grow from pressing keys to playing songs.
Who it is for
The site is built for people at the very start: children finding their first notes, adults deciding whether to take up the piano, and students who need a keyboard for a music class. It is also useful to people who already play — for checking a chord shape, trying a melody on a laptop while traveling, or playing a MIDI keyboard through the browser without installing anything. The lessons and songs assume no prior knowledge, and every page with a keyboard works the same way, so what you learn on one page carries over to the next.
How the sound works
The grand piano is the Salamander Grand Piano, a Yamaha C5 recorded by Alexander Holm and released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Notes were recorded every three semitones at several strengths; the site loads four of those strengths. When you play a note between two recorded ones, your browser shifts the nearest recording by one semitone, which most listeners cannot hear. With a velocity-sensitive MIDI keyboard, soft notes use the soft recordings and hard notes the loud ones, so the tone changes the way a real piano's does.
The electric piano and the organ are not recordings. They are generated in your browser from simple waveforms, which is why they are available immediately.
The first time you open a page with a keyboard, your browser downloads the grand piano recordings (about 6 MB) and keeps them in its cache for later visits.
Playing on a computer keyboard
The computer keys follow the layout many music programs use. The bottom letter row, Z through the slash key, plays the white keys of one octave starting on C, with S, D, G, H, J, L and the semicolon for the black keys between them. The top letter row, Q through the right bracket, plays the next octave up, with the number row for its black keys. The left and right arrow keys move the whole range down or up an octave, and the space bar works as the sustain pedal. Because the site reads the physical position of each key, the shape is the same on QWERTY, AZERTY and QWERTZ keyboards.
What it does not do
It does not score your playing, keep time with a metronome, slow songs down or transpose them, and its song arrangements have no separate left-hand part. It has no accounts and does not save anything to a server: recordings stay in your browser, and a share link carries the notes inside the link itself. The songs are public-domain melodies in simple arrangements written for this site, shown as sheet music with the letter name under every note and as plain letter notes.
Contact
Questions, bug reports and song suggestions are welcome at hello@onlinepianokeyboard.com. If something does not work, say which browser and device you used, and whether you were playing with a mouse, a touch screen, the computer keyboard or a MIDI keyboard.