Want to learn the piano? Well, there’s an app for that. While they don’t replace playing an actual piano, these are the best piano apps from Android smartphones or IOS such as Ipad and Iphones that will help you practice when you’re on the go.
If you’ve ever dreamt of learning to play the piano, there are about a hundred reasons why you should start.
Studies have found that playing the pianoreduces stress and anxiety, improves hand-eye coordination, helps kids do better in school, and even boosts self-esteem.
Not to mention that playing the piano is just plain fun.
But learning to play can be challenging, and it’s easy to get frustrated when the skills don’t come as naturally as you’d like.
Luckily, in this digital age, there are a huge number of resources to draw from to help you on your journey. One useful tool is piano apps that you can download on your phone or tablet.
Search for the word “piano” in your app store or google playstore and you’ll be shocked at how many different options there are.
We’re here to help you sift through them by giving you our recommendation for the 15 best piano apps out there.
1. World of Notes
World of Notes is a brand new app focused on younger learners and helping them to learn note names, sight-reading, and key signatures. It was developed in conjunction with Merriam School of Music, the leading early childhood education music specialists best known for their Family Music Program, together with several leading game designers and pedagogists.
In a fun and easy-to-navigate game environment with colorful characters, trophies, and leaderboards. Kids (and adults) can practice playing notes on a staff, as well as click-and-drag games for note names as well.
The app has been studied by the University of Ottawa for its effectiveness and found to be of equal effectiveness in the most intensive classroom learning environments.
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2. Perfect Piano
Perfect Piano is the highest-rated piano simulator app available today.
Designed for Android systems, this 88-key intelligent piano simulator not only serves as a teaching tool by guiding you through thousands of pieces of sheet music but it also lets you connect with other fledgling pianists around the world.
There are weekly challenges that let you compete against other users or if you are the less competitive type, you can create a guild with your friends to provide support for one another and share songs you’ve been working on.
The app supports a USB MIDI keyboard, so once you’re ready to graduate to a real live instrument, Perfect Piano can provide a smooth transition.
The app even comes with a widget you can keep on your home screen, which lets you play around on the keys without even opening the app itself.
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3. Simply Piano by JoyTunes
Simply Piano was rated as one of the best iPhone apps of 2016, and the developers are continually upgrading and reworking it. The app also works for Android users, and it’s an excellent tool for piano players of any level.
Simply Piano works in tandem with your real-life piano or keyboard and has the ability to register what you are playing and give you real-time feedback. All you do is place your device on your piano and start playing. It’s that simple.
In addition to the library of your favoritesongs to choose from, there are also courses that you can take depending on your skill level. You can take two courses for free and then upgrade to a subscription for access to unlimited courses.
This app can truly make a difference in your piano playing abilities, and it even won aWorld Summit Awardfrom the United Nations.
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4. Piano Free–Keyboard with Magic Tiles Music Games
The title is a little wordy but this app offers some really cool features that will hone your piano playing skills in no time, and it’s available for both Android and Apple devices.
This app offers similar features to other piano simulator teaching bestapps, where you can practice reading sheet music and chords, but it also lets you record what you play.
What’s really awesome about the recording feature is that the app allows you to choose from a number of different instruments for playback. So you can hear how your piece sounds on the accordion, the harp, the cello, or several other instruments.
Recording yourselfis a surefire way to improve your skills, and this app lets you do that in a really fun and creative way.
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5. Yousician
Yousician is designed to help you learn the piano, guitar, bass, or ukulele by guiding you through the process in the way that a live music teacher would.
Isn’t technology amazing?
You play your real instrument while following along with different pianolessons provided by the app, and receive feedback on how well you’re doing.
There are a wide array of features to get you hooked, like weekly challenges and training in music theory.
Yousician was designed by music teachers, and you can be confident in its teaching abilities because it is actually used by music teachers all over the world as a complement to their in-person lessons.
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6. Real Piano Teacher 2
RealPiano Teacher was rated as one of the best Android piano apps, and their second version has an even wider range of features, like addictive games, additional instruments, and hundreds of great lessons.
You can choose between a number of different playing modes, depending on how much help you want, or if you want to just freestyle your own music.
In-game mode, you can compete against family and friends to see who can play songs the best. And there are a ton of fun songs in a variety of genres to choose from.
If you’re someone who really enjoysplaying pop music, this has some great app options for you.
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7. Vivace: Learn to Read Music
To truly excel at playing the piano, being able to read music is essential.
Vivace offers engaging tutorials that help you understand music theory so that you’ll have a baseline for being able to read music.
The app is very customizable, so it can meet you at whatever skill level you’re at. The illustrated lessons guide you through each step of the learning process, covering all 15 key signatures.
Vivace is only available for Android users, so if you have an Apple device, check out the app “Notes–Sight Reader Trainer” for a comparable teaching tool.
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8. Perfect Ear–Ear Trainer
As a musician, training your ear is just as important as training your fingers.
This highly rated Android app takes a different approach to learning to play the piano, with tutorials that teach you how to recognize different chords and rhythms, allowing you to hear music in a new way.
Perfect Ear incorporates the solfege method, which is one of the most popular ways of teaching music theory, by training the ear to distinguish different notes and truly understand how they work together.
This app might be a little more serious than some of the others we discussed but if you want to establish a solid foundation for your playing, training your ear is key.
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9. Flowkey
With this app, you will learn to play beautiful piano music from the very beginning.
It could learn more music depending on your playing level such as Beginner, intermediate and advance. It also receives instant feedback on your playing that it uses a microphone or MIDI connection.
This app also allows you to check your achievements in the learning progress indicator every time you complete any courses on it.
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10. Real Piano Teacher
This app is a fun and interactive tutor that teaches you with audio and offline speech. You can also share the recording with friends & family.
RealPiano Teacher supports USB Midi Keyboard and standard general Midi protocol that allows the connection of real physical piano or Midi keyboards such as Yamaha, Casio or any real keyboard.
This app is perfect for you to play and create your desired freestyle music, you can also add beats to any song that you would like to compose and sync it to a cloud with this best piano app.
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11. Best Piano Lessons
The Best Piano Lessons app can be also used as a piano without learning mode. There is also an option of your own recording which will allow you to save your musical compositions and play them later.
This magic keyboard allows you to set the amount from 10 to 24 for the visibility of the piano keys, you may also move the keyboard with one key or one octave to the right or to the left.
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12. Piano Academy – Learn Piano
Piano Academy supports video tutorials from your personal instructor which includes topics like notes, the staff, chords and much more. It helps you too to train your musical hearing, hard-coordination, and sense of rhythm.
This is also suitable for all ages, from kids to adults to help transform even the complete beginners into actual pianists.
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13. Piano – Play & Learn Free songs.
It’s a real piano sound with rich content wherein new hit songs area added daily with an adjustable difficulty level.
If you play this music game every day, you will be able to improve your piano skills. You may then share and invite your friends for a challenge to compete for the best score.
The most popular songs for this are A Little Night Music by W.A. Mozart, Fur Elise by L.V. Beethoven, Hello by Adele and many others.
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14. Piano Scales & Chords Free
This app can improvise to backing tracks or metronome, record and save. These can be viewed as a reference or played along to or repeated and scales can be played ascending or descending or both with slow down/speed up the scale.
It has a Scales and Chords Games to test your knowledge and advance through levels and an area to check to progress.
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15. Piano – music games to play & learn songs for free
With this app, it features an ultra-realistic piano keyboard with 7 Different piano keyboards and musical instruments such as Grand Piano, Vintage Piano, Harp, Electric Piano, Xylophone, Church Organ, Harpsichord.
The app also offers a Metronome, pedal, dual scrollable keyboard that could help you learn thousands of classic piano songs and become a music maestro. Learning a new song has never been that simple! New songs are added on the playbook every week for you to keep practicing.
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16. Note Trainer Lite Learn Piano
Note Trainer app has a practice mode, an option to turn on or off-note labels and labels on the piano as you learn to read notes which is also great for those just learning to read music as well as those challenging themselves to increase the speed at which they can read music notes.
This can track your scores and see when you’ve exceeded your personal best and achievements with badges to measure progress. It also shows your full statistics where you are making mistakes and note reading accuracy.
Note trainer lite is a fun sight-reading game that teaches you to recognize music notes. The game increases in speed and difficulty over time so that you can truly learn to sight-read music notes effortlessly.
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Piano Apps Are a Great First Step
If learning to play the piano is a goal you’ve set for yourself, then trying out some of these piano apps is a good place to start.
You can see how it feels, and start learning some of the basics.
From there, you can decide whethertaking lessonsin person is a sensible next step for you. As great as technology can be, nothing beats the one-on-one teaching abilities of a real live human.
Contact us when you’re ready to start taking piano lessons, or for any questions, you might have about your piano playing journey.