Create Piano Diagrams & Chord Charts in Seconds

Who creates piano diagrams this way?

It is for the people who need the same keyboard picture over and over in a consistent style: method book authors, worksheet designers, teachers building handouts, anyone putting together a course or an e-book. If you have ever drawn a keyboard in Canva, nudged a black key half a pixel, and then realised you need a hundred and ninety-nine more of them, you are the reader.

What comes out is always a keyboard, drawn correctly, at whatever size your page needs — and from there it goes into the design tool you already lay your book out in. That is the division of labour: this hands you the picture that used to cost fifteen minutes, your layout program does everything around it. If what you need is to draw and annotate freely, this is not built for that.

One thing that surprises people: you do not need a MIDI keyboard for any of this. The diagrams are built by clicking the keys with a mouse, so a laptop on a train is enough.

How do you make a single diagram?

One diagram takes under a minute, and the steps are the same for the first and the five hundredth.

1. Switch on Toggle Mode. Press T. A click now leaves the key lit instead of just sounding it.
2. Click the notes. A second click takes one off. Press S over a lit key and it switches to your second colour — for a root note, or the left hand against the right.
3. Add the fingering. With a key selected, 1 to 5 put a finger number under it. F clears the numbers, P clears everything.
4. Press C. The image is on your disk.

Two settings save time later. Sharps or flats follows the key you pick, so a piece in D flat does not grow C sharps; # respells a single note if one example needs it. And the export presets — Web, Print, Social — set the resolution for you, with Print scaling four times up for paper.

All of it sits behind the gear icon. Display is the look: colours and note names. General sets how many octaves. Capture is the output: file type and presets. Branding is your credit line. Set them once and the rest of the book follows.

How do you make two hundred of them without losing your mind?

Two hundred diagrams by hand is where the project usually dies, so there are two answers and you will probably use both.

The first is that consistency is free. Keyboard width, colours, note names, credit line — set them once and every capture follows the same template. Nothing drifts between chapter one and chapter nine.

The second is the Progression Generator, in the feature menu under Create, or Ctrl+Shift+D. Type a progression — Roman numerals like I IV V vi in the key you set, or just the chord names, “Am F C G” — or start from one of the ready-made progressions across genres. You get one finished keyboard image per step, note names already on them, fingerings whenever you want them. Missing a chord? Search it and drag it in where it belongs; drag tiles to reorder, remove one with the ×. Each image keeps its own editor: change that chord’s quality, flip it to an inversion, move it to the left hand, re-render that tile alone. Everything from a plain triad up to thirteenths and altered dominants is in the list. And before you export, press play: the progression sounds bar by bar at your tempo, with a metronome if you like — a quick way to hear that the example in chapter nine is the one you meant.

If you want the same look across two hundred diagrams, set the colours and the keyboard width before you export the first one, because every later capture copies the template rather than the diagram before it.

What ends up inside the exported image?

The exported image stacks four things, top to bottom: the note-name bar, the keys with their highlights, the fingering row, and a small credit line. Each can be switched off.

That credit line is yours to write — your name and year, your publisher, your site — or you turn it off for a layout where the credit lives on the copyright page. Set once, it appears on everything you export.

You choose the file type too: PNG for crisp edges in your layout program, JPG when the file must be small, WebP for the web. At print scale the keyboard comes out four times its screen size.

One thing that matters at volume: the files name themselves. An E flat major scale for the right hand arrives as Eb-Major-Scale-RH with the date behind it, not as screenshot-47. After an afternoon of exporting the folder is still sorted.

What if you need a whole song rather than single chords?

A whole song is a different shape of document, and that is the lead sheet editor. Chords go on a beat grid, lyrics underneath, sections with repeats, first and second endings, the navigation marks a real chart needs — segno, coda, fine, D.C. al Coda.

It reads ChordPro files, so a chart you already keep in that format opens straight into the grid rather than being retyped. Transposing is one move through the circle of fifths, with the spelling redone properly, which matters when your singer wants it a third lower the week before the book goes out.

Then it prints three different ways, and the difference is who is reading it. Chord symbols for a musician. Keyboard pictures above each chord for a student who cannot read them yet. A Real Book layout when it should look like the fake books people already own. There is also the Nashville option, where every chord is its scale-degree number instead of a letter — one chart that works in every key, which is why session players write them that way.