Sightreading is the ability to read sheet music and play it on an instrument as fast as you're reading it. It typically takes decades of daily practice to master.

Pianotes is a tool designed to learn sightreading in the most efficient way possible. Inspired by touch-typing training tools like keybr.com and monkeytype.com, it uses a muscle-memory building approach to consistently increase your playing speed, but applied to reading sheet music instead of typing!

While taking piano lessons, I noticed that my ability to learn new songs wasn't improving as quickly as I'd hoped. This is a common problem caused by the repetition and logical patterns within typical sheet music, which leads to building muscle memory for specific songs rather than for reading sheet music in general.

Since I can type incredibly fast on a keyboard without looking at the keys (thanks to touch-typing practice), I wanted to achieve the same fluency on piano (or any instrument, for that matter). I needed the touch-typing equivalent for piano. It didn't exist, I wanted it to exist, so I built it!

Nope! At least not for most people. If you enjoy using Pianotes and want to support its development, or if you're an advanced user who needs specific musical keys or clefs (alto, tenor, baritone, etc.), you can create an account to unlock additional features. This costs a few euros per month, or you can purchase a lifetime subscription for permanent access. However, most people won't need these premium features, so payment is completely optional.

If you have a compelling reason why you need these features but can't pay for some reason, feel free to contact me and I'll see what I can do.

I'm Tjeerd Bakker, an engineer and software developer who works on complex optimization problems for my day job. Over the past 7 years, I've spent hundreds (if not thousands) of hours figuring out how to create Pianotes. Could I have spent those years practicing piano and learning sightreading the traditional way? Probably. Did I instead learn everything about signal processing, optimization, and web development to automate the boring parts? Also yes.

Have a question, found a bug, or have suggestions for features you'd like to see? Let me know!