The Piano Teaching Tool for Online Lessons

Who is this piano teaching tool for?

This is for piano teachers who teach over video — Zoom, Meet, Teams, Skype, whichever one your students already have. It solves the one problem every online lesson has: a webcam pointed at a keyboard shows hands, not notes, and “that’s a C major seventh” stays a sound rather than a shape. Here the shape is on screen, named, in colour, while you play it.

It is the instrument, not the paperwork. Scheduling, invoicing and student records stay in whatever studio platform you already use, and what your students learn next stays with you. If the admin side is what you are shopping for, this is not built for that — buy it separately and put this beside it.

And if you teach in person at an acoustic piano, be honest with yourself about whether you need it. You are already sitting next to the student and can simply point at the keys. The teachers this pays off for are the ones whose hands and the student’s eyes are in different rooms.

How do you show what you are playing in a video lesson?

To show what you are playing in a video lesson, you share a browser tab. That is the whole setup — no second camera, no capture software, nothing for the student to install.

1. Open the app in Chrome, Edge or Opera. Safari cannot do MIDI; on an iPad use the free MIDIWeb browser. Then switch MIDI on — settings, MIDI tab, flip the toggle. It is off until you do.
2. Say yes to the browser. Chrome asks once. Click Allow, and take this slowly with a student: a “Block” sticks, and MIDI stays dead until the permission is reset by hand.
3. Pick your keyboard. Tick it in the list, play a note, watch the key light up. Refresh finds a keyboard you plugged in late; the Audio & MIDI check tells you which half is missing if it stays quiet.
4. Set up the view. Settings → General for how many octaves, Settings → Display for note names, colours and where the pedal sits. The staff is the Score dock, under Display too. A beginner lesson and a jazz lesson want different screens.
5. Start your call and share. Zoom and Google Meet let you share one browser tab, which is tidiest. Teams may only offer a window or the whole screen — then press F11 first so the tabs and address bar stay out of the picture.
6. Play. Every key lights up on their screen, chord names appear as you hold them, the pedal shows when it goes down.

Sound needs two minutes before the first lesson, because the steps above only settle the picture. An acoustic or stage piano still comes through your microphone as it always did. If the app’s own sound should travel too, tick the audio option when you start sharing — Chrome calls it “Also share tab audio”. Record thirty seconds and listen back.

Teaching at an acoustic piano? Keep it open anyway. The live highlights follow a MIDI keyboard, so you drive the screen with the mouse instead: click the chord onto the keys while you explain it, and send it home as a diagram.

How do you explain theory so the student actually sees it?

Theory is where this tool earns its place. Naming a chord aloud teaches a word; lighting up the notes that make it, while the student watches, teaches the shape underneath it.

The strongest version of that is the diatonic view, which lives in the theory bar — open Learn, then Scales or Chords, and switch the mode dropdown to Diatonic. Pick a key and the seven chords that belong to it appear on the keyboard, each with its name on the keys and its Roman numeral above. Suddenly “the four chord” is a place your student can point at. Play the one-five-six-four from three songs they already know, and they see why those four keep turning up together.

Around it sit the smaller explanations that eat lesson time otherwise. Scales light up degree by degree with the numbers over them. Note names sit on every key until the student stops needing them — or an animal on each white key for younger children, a cow on C, a dog on D. The circle of fifths opens as its own picture for key signatures. And picking a key fixes the spelling on screen, so an F sharp stays an F sharp.

If you want a chord to stick for a week, show it on the keys with its degree rather than only naming it, because the number says where it comes from and the name only says what to call it.

What can you send home after the lesson?

Everything you demonstrated can leave the lesson as a file, which is the part that usually breaks. The student nods, the call ends, and by Wednesday the chord is a vague memory of your hands.

The quickest version is a picture. Click the notes onto the keys, add the finger numbers, export a clean keyboard diagram with your studio name on it. A whole progression goes in one batch: type it as Roman numerals with a key, or just as chord names — “Am F C G” works — and every step arrives in the same style. Need the borrowed chord your student just asked about? Search it and drag it into the row; its degree, (♭VII) for B♭ in C, stands right next to the name. Press play, set the tempo, switch on the metronome, and the progression sounds bar by bar while you point at the chord that is playing.

For anything with rhythm in it, record instead. Play the passage, stop the recording, and you have a MIDI file to send. Your student loads it in the same app at home and plays along with it slowly, with the notes falling towards the keys, as often as they like.

For a song rather than an exercise, build a lead sheet: chords on a beat grid, lyrics, sections and repeats, transposed to suit the voice. The PDF comes as chord symbols, as keyboard pictures for a student who cannot read them yet, or in a Real Book layout.

What do your students do with it between lessons?

Your students open the same address you do, which is the quiet advantage of the whole thing: nothing you show in a lesson is locked to your machine. They load the MIDI file you recorded and play along with it as slowly as they need. They open a song of their own — a MIDI file, sheet music, a PDF, an audio track or a YouTube video — and work on the passage that is giving them trouble rather than the whole piece.

They can also drill the things you would otherwise spend lesson time counting. Reading notes and recognising chords work with a mouse or a touchscreen; scales and arpeggios want a MIDI keyboard, because the app is listening to what the student plays and scoring how even and how accurate it was. Ear training runs either way. Each of those keeps a record, so at the next lesson you can ask what they actually practised instead of guessing.

Your name can sit on all of it. Replace the logo with your studio’s, put your own text on the diagrams you export, and the material your students collect looks like it came from you rather than from a piece of software they found.

What do you need for it?

You need a computer or tablet with a current browser, a MIDI keyboard, and the video call software you already teach in. Nothing is installed, so there is nothing for your students to fail to install either — you send an address.

MIDI input runs through the browser, which is the one thing worth checking before your first lesson: Chrome, Edge and Opera support it, Safari does not, and on an iPad the free MIDIWeb browser fills that gap. Phones are out — below a certain screen width the keys stop being playable, so the app asks for a tablet or a computer. Without a MIDI keyboard a good part of it still works by mouse or touch — playing the keys, the theory views, reading notes, chord training and ear training — which is enough for a student who has not bought one yet. Scale, arpeggio and progression training are the exceptions: they score how evenly you play, so they need a keyboard to listen to.

One setting is easy to miss: MIDI is off until you switch it on, and the browser asks for permission once on every computer. On a new computer, or the first time a student sets theirs up, that is the step to walk through together.