Rainbow Piano Help Documentation

A complete guide to the online piano, from the first note to a saved recording.

Last Updated: November 14, 2026

1. Getting Started

The piano has five tabs: Play (chord pads and things to try), Songs, Games, Record and Stickers, with Settings and How it works beside them. The keys and the night sky above them stay at the top whichever tab is open; what appears under the keys changes with the tab. The round button at the top right switches the site between light and dark.

Tap any key to start. Browsers allow sound only after you touch or click the page, so the first tap on the piano starts the sound.

2. Instruments

Pick an instrument from the row above the sky: Piano, Music box, Xylophone, Guitar, Flute, Organ, Robot, Animals or Drums. A short note plays so you can hear the new sound. Every sound is made live in the browser, so nothing is downloaded.

• Animals: each of the twelve notes is an animal singing at the key's pitch (cat, duck, dog, cow, elephant, frog, pig, goat, sheep, monkey, lion and bird), and its picture sits on the key.
• Drums: each key is a drum sound (kick, rim, snare, clap, hat, toms, open hat, shaker, bell and crash), named on the key. Drums ring out even if you let go at once.

3. Playing the Keys

Touch, click or slide across the keys. Several fingers can play at once, and sliding plays every note on the way. Pressing nearer the bottom of a key plays it a little louder. On a computer, the keys of your keyboard play the piano too (see section 17). Each note sends a coloured note creature up into the sky; Settings can keep them at the keys instead.

4. Note Names and Colours

Note names, under the keys, labels the keys Do Re Mi, C D E, Sa Re Ga (the Indian sargam), 1 2 3 or not at all. Each note always has the same colour: Do red, Re orange, Mi yellow, Fa green, Sol blue, La purple and Si pink, with the black keys between their neighbours. The colours appear on the keys, the creatures, the falling notes and the chord pads, so you can follow a tune by its colours before you read notes. Settings, Key colours, Black and white shows a plain keyboard with a small coloured dot on each white key.

5. Moving Up and Down

The piano shows as many keys as fit the screen and the key size you chose (Settings), from 8 to 36 white keys. The arrows under the keys move the keys on screen one octave down or up, from C1 to C8; the range shown sits between the arrows. Z and X move the letter keys of the computer keyboard one octave down or up, and the keys on screen follow when the letters would leave them. While a song or a game is open, the piano shows exactly the notes it needs and the arrows rest; the letters then start where most of the notes are, and Z and X still move them.

6. Hold Notes, Beats and Chord Pads

• Hold notes keeps notes ringing after you let go, like a piano's pedal; press it again to let them fade. Holding Space, or a MIDI keyboard's sustain pedal, does the same while held.
• Beat plays a rhythm to play along with: Click, Pop, Rock, Disco, Waltz or Dhol, with Beat speed from 60 to 160 beats a minute. Dots in the sky show the beat. The beat stops when you start a song or a game, or when the page is hidden, and starts off on every visit.
• Chord pads, on the Play tab: C, F, G, A minor, D minor and E minor. Each plays three notes and a bass note together while you hold it; the coloured dots and names show its notes.

7. Chord Names

Hold three or more keys that make a chord and the sky names it: major, minor, seven, major seven, minor seven, diminished, augmented, sus two or sus four. With Do Re Mi note names the name uses them (such as Do major); otherwise it uses letters (C major). Chord names show on the Play and Record tabs.

8. Learning a Song

Open Songs. The list has 46 songs: 31 folk tunes and classics, four Indian songs and eleven finger practice pieces, each marked Easy, Medium or Hard with a small outline of its tune. Filter by group or level, or type part of a name in Find a song (accents and signs do not matter: fur elise finds Für Elise); My recordings lists your own recordings as songs. Tap a song: the piano fits its notes and the song's controls appear under the keys.

• Listen first plays the song with the keys lighting up.
• Step by step waits on each note until you press the glowing key. Pressing the first glowing key starts it. A wrong key shakes the right one.
• Play in time counts in three clicks and keeps the beat; notes fall to the keys and each one is judged Perfect, Good or Missed.

Speed has Slow (half speed), Steady, Normal and Fast. Backing chords plays an accompaniment worked out from the tune (Canon has its own written chords). Start also pauses and goes on; the round buttons start the song again or close it. In finger practice, the small numbers on the notes are fingers: 1 is the thumb, 5 the little finger.

9. Stars and Scores

When a song ends, a result shows the stars and what happened. In Step by step, three stars for at most one slip in ten notes, two for at most one slip in three, one for finishing. In Play in time, a note within about a tenth of a second is Perfect and within about a fifth Good; with Good counted as 70 percent of a Perfect, 85 percent of the song gives three stars and 60 percent two. Listen first gives no stars, and offers to play the song step by step. Your best stars stay on the song's card, and Next song opens the next one in the list.

10. The Echo Game

The piano plays a row of notes, then you play them back. Every round adds one more note, and the notes come a little faster. A wrong key costs one of three hearts and shows the right key, and the row is played again. Choose Three (Do, Mi, Sol), Five (Do to Sol) or Eight notes (Do to high Do). Eight remembered notes give three stars, five two; your best for each choice is kept.

11. The Note Hunt Game

Find the key that matches what the sky shows, ten notes in a round. Show me: Colours (a creature in the note's colour), Names, Music notes (a note on a treble staff) or Sounds (only the note's sound, with Hear it again). Which notes: Do to Sol, Do to Do, or up to high Sol. For colours, names and sounds any octave of the note counts; on the staff only the exact key. After two wrong tries the right key glows. Only notes found on the first try count: nine give three stars, six two. Your best for each kind is kept.

12. Recording and Sound Files

Open Record and press Record under the keys. The recording starts with your first note and stops when you press Stop, after three minutes or after 4,000 notes. It keeps the notes you play with their timing, loudness and instrument (you can change instruments while recording); it does not use a microphone. Each recording is saved as My song with a number. For each recording:

• Play plays it back with the keys lighting up; press again to stop.
• Learn it opens it on the Songs tab like any other song.
• Save sound file makes a WAV file (CD quality, stereo) with your room echo setting and saves it to your downloads: a few seconds for a short tune, longer for a long recording.
• The pencil renames it (up to 40 characters) and the bin deletes it after you confirm.

Up to 30 recordings are kept in this browser. With 30 kept, Record says first that the new one will take the place of the oldest and names it; press Stop without playing to keep it. All the tools on the site share the browser's small storage, so the recordings together may use about a megabyte; when that is used up, a recording stops by itself and keeps what was played. If the browser refuses to save at all, a recording stays until the page closes and can still be saved as a sound file. One sound file is made at a time.

13. Stickers

The Stickers tab shows the notes you have played, your days of music, the songs you finished and your longest Echo, and 24 stickers, each with its task: from your first note and 100, 1,000 and 5,000 notes, to trying five instruments, hearing all twelve animals, holding a chord, playing 50 notes with a beat, finishing songs, three stars, finishing a song in time, three Indian songs, three finger practice pieces, Echo and Note hunt scores, a first recording, the big piano and playing on three and seven different days. Locked stickers show how to get them. A new sticker pops up with a sound, and a dot on the tab marks it.

14. The Big Piano

The square button at the top right of the sky opens the big piano: the sky and the keys fill the screen, the browser goes full screen where it allows, and buttons in the sky move up and down an octave. Songs, games and recordings keep going. Esc or the same button leaves it. The big piano opens above everything else on the page, so nothing can cover the keys.

15. MIDI Keyboards

In browsers that support MIDI keyboards, such as Chrome and Edge on a computer, connect a USB or Bluetooth MIDI keyboard, open Play and press Use a MIDI keyboard; the browser may ask first. The line under the button says how many keyboards were found, and keyboards plugged in later are picked up. The keys play with their own loudness, the sustain pedal holds notes, and a note off screen moves the piano to it. Browsers without MIDI support say so under the button.

16. Settings and Your Data

Settings has: Key colours (Rainbow or Black and white), Key size (Big, Medium or Small), Show computer keyboard letters on the keys (on by default with a mouse), Let note creatures float up into the sky, Volume, Room echo (Off, Small room or Big hall) and Clear stars and stickers. Changes are saved at once. The light or dark look follows the site's theme button.

Settings, stars, scores, stickers and recordings are kept in this browser's storage on this device. Nothing is saved on a first visit until you play or change something. Clear stars and stickers resets the stars, game scores, stickers and the note count after you confirm; recordings and settings stay. Clearing the browser's site data deletes everything. Data from the earlier version of this piano in this browser is moved over once.

17. Keyboard and Accessibility

Every button works with the keyboard. The tabs are a tab list: the arrow keys, Home and End move between them, and the arrow keys move through the instruments and each set of choices. While you use the piano (after a click or tap on it) and are not typing: A S D F G H J K L play white keys and W E T Y U O P black keys, Z and X move an octave, Space holds notes, and Esc leaves the big piano. Elsewhere on the page these keys do what they always do. Chord names are announced to screen readers, and with reduced motion set on your device the creatures do not float and there are no sparkles or confetti.

18. Privacy

Every sound is made inside this browser; what you play, your recordings, stars and settings are never uploaded, and there is no account and no server-side storage. A recording leaves the device only when you save it as a sound file yourself. MIDI keyboards are read only after you press Use a MIDI keyboard. Like every page on ZeroDataUpload, the page shows advertising and counts visits; the cookie banner explains the choices and the Privacy Policy explains both. What you play is never part of them.

19. How It Was Checked

Before this page was published, the parts of the tool that work things out were checked against independent references: 377,649 cases in 10 groups. They include every note name and key position against the rules of the piano keyboard, the chord names against a list worked out from music theory, the song library (every note readable, every finger number in place, none of the removed songs left), the backing chords and songs against the earlier version, sound files read back by an independent reader, and saved data made to break the tool. Then the page was tried at four screen widths in both themes, with every instrument heard, songs, games and recordings played through, and a MIDI keyboard simulated.

20. Troubleshooting

• No sound. Tap a key once: browsers allow sound only after you touch the page. Check your device's volume and the Volume setting. On an iPhone, the piano asks the browser to play even with the ring switch on silent; if you still hear nothing, turn the switch off.
• The sound comes late. Bluetooth speakers and headphones add a delay; wired ones or the device's own speaker play at once.
• The computer keys do nothing. Click or tap the piano first, and make sure no box (such as Find a song) is being typed in.
• Use a MIDI keyboard says it cannot. The browser has no MIDI support; try Chrome or Edge on a computer.
• A recording would not save. The browser's storage is full: delete an old recording, or save it as a sound file first.
• My stars and recordings are gone. They are kept per browser and device; a private window or cleared browser data starts afresh.

21. Support

For questions the FAQ does not answer, use the contact form.