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. 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 one strength first and adds three more when you connect a MIDI keyboard. When you play a note between two recorded ones, your browser shifts the nearest recording by one semitone. With a velocity-sensitive MIDI keyboard, soft notes use softer recordings and hard notes louder ones as those layers become available.
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 3 MB) and keeps them in its cache for later visits.
Playing on a computer keyboard
Tab also reaches the piano keys directly. Left and Right choose a neighboring note without playing it; hold Enter or Space to hear it. Home and End reach the displayed range's ends, and Page Up and Page Down move an octave. When a piano key has focus, Space plays that note; the Sustain button still controls the pedal.
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.
Practice tools and their limits
On the full piano and chord finder, open Identify notes & chords to name the keys you hold. Keep notes from each tap lets you build a chord one tap at a time. Kept keys show a check mark; tap one again to remove it, or use Clear notes. The finder checks exact matches among 15 chord types and shows alternatives when the same notes have more than one name. It reads your selected keys and does not listen through a microphone.
Three songs have two-hand beginner arrangements: Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Ode to Joy and Silent Night. The score shows the melody and our simple bass notes together. Listen and Practice can use either hand or both. Practice checks which keys you press, not the rhythm, finger choice or how long you hold them. These arrangements do not replace a teacher or an original classical score.
The chord progression generator lets you edit and loop up to eight chords in any major or minor key, compare inversions, download MIDI and share the settings in a link.
The song library can be searched by title or composer and filtered by level, category or white keys only. Each song has Listen at 50%, 75% or full speed, optional repeat, and a Practice mode that waits for each correct key. A metronome beside each keyboard provides a steady pulse with tap tempo, bar accents and subdivisions, including in Play mode. Its beat runs independently of song playback and is not included in recordings. The dedicated metronome also remains available. The games score their own rounds; the site does not assess your physical piano technique.
The song arrangements cannot be transposed. Most show the melody alone; the three two-hand scores add simple bass notes. All use public-domain melodies in arrangements written for this site, shown as sheet music with letter names and as plain letter notes. There are no accounts: recordings stay in your browser, and a share link carries the notes inside the link itself.
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.