Best piano apps for intermediate adults
flowkey through forScore, with the price and where the lessons end.
Ten apps still teach something after the first year. Most of them stop at their own arrangement of a song, or at a note-by-note grade of what you played. After that you need a score you understand.
The apps
flowkey
Classic is $16.49 a month or $99.99 a year and covers the courses, the classical pieces and the public-domain songs, and Premium at $24.99 or $149.99 adds pop, jazz and film. You watch a pianist’s hands over the score, Wait Mode holds each note until you play it, and you can slow it, loop it, or take one hand at a time. Every song is an arrangement made by flowkey’s pianists.
Simply Piano
It listens through the microphone and marks each note, with courses from beginner to advanced, five-minute workouts, and songs that unlock as you finish courses. The price is set in the app and varies by country and store; the US App Store listed 12 months at $119.99 to $149.99. Each song is a Simply Piano arrangement in up to three levels, and the printable versions are sold separately.
Skoove
$29.99 a month, $19.99 a month for three months, or $149.99 a year, with a free Basic tier of selected lessons. Over 400 lessons and courses from beginner to advanced, songs from Adele to Bach, and it listens through MIDI or the microphone. Premium adds one-on-one support from Skoove’s instructors.
Playground Sessions
$17.99 a month, $119.88 a year or $299 for life. Bootcamp runs Rookie, Intermediate and Advanced, with chords and rhythms in the middle and improvisation and voicings at the top, real-time feedback over MIDI or the microphone, and 2,000-plus songs in more than one difficulty each. The lifetime plan covers copyrighted songs for two years, then $3.33 a month.
Pianote
$25 a month or $229 a year for lessons only, $30 or $279 with the 950-plus song library. Real teachers on video, courses on chords, reading, jazz, blues and classical, and you record yourself and submit it for a teacher’s review in a livestream. The feedback is a person’s, after you send the video.
Yousician
$19.99 a month or $119.99 a year for one instrument, $29.99 or $179.99 for all five. It listens and grades pitch and timing, with lessons on reading, chords, sight-reading and ear training and songs across pop, rock and classical, in levels with points and goals. You track progress as a game score.
Piano Marvel
A free plan with 150-plus songs and 200-plus scored exercises; Premium is $17.99 a month or $129.99 a year for 25,000-plus songs and exercises, 200-plus video lessons, and your own uploaded music. It grades every performance over MIDI, has the SASR sight-reading test, and its library leans on Hal Leonard, Alfred and FJH method books, which makes it the one here built around reading.
Tomplay
$119.99 a year or from $15.99 a month, with 100,000-plus titles in eight levels from beginner to virtuoso, the score scrolling as backing tracks recorded by professional musicians play, and a tempo you can slow down. Printing is rationed, 4 a month or 48 a year.
forScore
$24.99 once, on iPad, iPhone, Mac and Vision Pro, with an optional Pro subscription at $14.99 a year. It is built around PDF, so every score you buy anywhere lands in one library, with Apple Pencil markings, setlists, and page turns from a pedal or MIDI, and it ships with free collections of Brahms, Schumann, Haydn, Liszt and Satie.
MuseScore
MuseScore Studio is free, open-source notation software on desktop, iPhone, iPad and Android, and it opens and plays MusicXML and MIDI and takes a MIDI keyboard. The separate musescore.com app has 1.5 million free scores from its community, with a Pro subscription from $39.99 the first year for transposing and more. It plays a score back.
After the apps
The piece people stall on next is a Chopin nocturne. The left hand takes the attention, and you lose the melody while you learn the pattern. A Chopin Left Hand edition keeps Chopin’s right hand, taken from a public-domain engraving and checked against the edition text, and puts one plain root-position chord under it, named above the staff (B, F♯⁷, C♯m) and numbered below (I, V⁷, vii°⁷/V), so you can hear the real melody over the progression in the first session. Boxed section letters show the form, and a one-page analysis explains the notable chords and why the piece ends the way it does.
Learn the melody over those chords, then put Chopin’s own left-hand patterns on top. You can restart from any bar because the chord has a name. I learned Op. 9 No. 2 this way, with his right hand from the first day.
Keep Piano Marvel, on the free plan if a digital piano is on the bench, for the sight-reading test and the scored exercises. For the music, one Chopin Left Hand nocturne at $9, or the Nocturnes set at $59.
Which nocturne
Op. 15 No. 3, Op. 72 No. 1, and Op. 32 No. 1 are the three to start on. Op. 32 No. 1 is level 4 of 8, B major, 65 bars, an ornamented melody over simple broken chords in a small span, and a bare recitative at the end that turns it to B minor. The reasons are in which Chopin nocturne to learn first.