5 Apps That Piano Players Need for Essential Skills

​Technology is so cool when it helps us with our daily lives and goals.

Today we’re going to go over my favorite five apps that will really help you learn and reinforce foundational skills needed by every piano student at every level of playing.  

The specific skills that we are focusing on today are reading music, sight reading and ear training.

I’ll go over each one in the video at the bottom so you can see what each one looks like and how to use them.

1. First, let’s look at the Music Reading Trainer App. This is a note reading app. One of the most fun features about this app is that it has an arcade game mode option that you can use to make note reading fun and compete with yourself. You can learn to read notes in any clef and there are a lot of different exercises offered to help drill in the notes. Many of the exercises are free and if you want to move to more advanced levels, there is a small fee.
2. Next, the Free Music Flash Cards App is free and is good for young beginners. The setup is very simple and applies some of the same concepts as the Music Reading Trainer App, but is a bit limited by the number of octaves one can play in as well as other options. This one is a great introduction into using apps for note reading and learning and allows you to really just focus on each note and where it is on the keyboard.
3. Flowkey is a different kind of app in that it focuses more on popular music along with familiar classical tunes that are fun to learn and play for others. You can pick a song, click on it and a keyboard will pop up and you can see where they notes are as they light up on the keyboard when they are played in the piece. You have the option to slow down the flow of the sheet music so it’s easier to follow as well as which hand you want to work on if you are practicing hands separately; it will light up the hand that you choose to work on. This app is best used to help you learn a piece…where you use Flowkey as one resource to help you learn it. Don’t count on this app though, to learn everything you want to on the piano, because you won’t cover foundational steps that you need to really grow and succeed.
4. For ear training, I really recommend the app Functional Ear Training. Ear training is important because it teaches us how to listen to our playing and what to listen for; which helps us identify and correct mistakes more successfully. Ear training also helps us identify chords, major and minor modes, intervals, and all kinds of things that are important in knowing and playing a piano piece. This app is best for those who already know their scales because this will help you learn to recognize the different notes in chords and if you already have the scale down, it’s a lot easier to move into this next level. Because this work is a bit more advanced than just very beginning level, I take you through several of the exercises given so you can have that extra help getting you through it the first few times.
5. The next ear training app is called Perfect Ear and it works a little differently from the previous one. This app is great for helping you to start identifying intervals and it may beneficial to start with this one before moving on to Functional Ear Training. You will learn how to identify intervals on your sheet music as well as play them on the keyboard. The more you work with this the more you’ll be able to identify your intervals by ear as well. This will really help your sight reading and improvisational work. You even get to sing with this app!

​Make sure you watch this video. It really helps to have someone go through examples of each one and show you how to use them instead of trying to do them on your own first, especially if you’re a beginner. 

If you like my tips and lessons, you will love the courses over on my website. Whether you are a beginner looking to get a solid foundation to build on or you are looking to take your existing skills to that next level, the online music courses on my website https://www.pianolessonsontheweb.com will help you do just that.