No MIDI keyboard connected

Computer keyboard: C4–F5

A S D F G H J K L are white keys from C, W E T Y U O P are black. Z and X move an octave down and up, C and V play softer and harder. Space is a tap in rhythm exercises. Any keyboard layout works.

From zero · MIDI keyboard and synth

Music with your hands: from sound to a track of your own

Twenty-two chapters on how a synth makes sound, what a MIDI keyboard sends, where the notes live, how to keep time, hear intervals and chords, and how to write a track out of all that. In every chapter you play, turn knobs and tap rhythms, and at the end you take away your own tune with a beat, a bass line and chords in a MIDI file.

Start with chapter 00 → Trainers 📓 Notebook

22chapters
183exercises in the chapters
20trainers with levels

Press any key: the piano shows the note on the staff

The map of the course

Eight parts, from sound to writing. Chapters build on each other, but looking ahead is allowed. A tick appears once a chapter is read and most of its exercises are passed.

Introduction

What your ear already knows

Five experiments, five minutes, not one technical term. Each shows something your hearing already does without any training. Then we set up your keyboard and look at how the course works.

≈ 25 min 🎯 3 exercises

Sound, synth, MIDI

String, frequency, octave

A lab notebook with a single string. Seven experiments: place a bet, listen, measure. At the end, the answer to why a low C and a high C sound like one note, and a first hint at why an octave has twelve keys.

≈ 40 min 🎯 5 exercises 02

How a synth makes sound

A violin and a flute play the same A, and you could never mix them up. In this chapter you build a synth from six blocks, one at a time, and at every step you hear what makes a sound the sound it is.

≈ 45 min 🎯 7 exercises 03

What a MIDI keyboard sends

There is no sound inside a MIDI keyboard. It only reports what you did. In this chapter you catch those reports: the bytes that go down the cable when you press a key or the pedal, or turn a wheel, and you learn to read them.

≈ 40 min 🎯 8 exercises

Keys and notes

The map of the keyboard

Eighty-eight keys, and fifty-two of them look exactly alike. A pianist still finds the right one in a split second without counting. The black keys are the landmarks, and the keyboard is a familiar town with neighbourhoods and street addresses.

≈ 35 min 🎯 15 exercises 05

Note names

One key has at least three names: C, do and 60, and some programs call it C3 as well. This chapter untangles the case clue by clue: a medieval hymn, Latin letters, octave numbers and the MIDI number.

≈ 40 min 🎯 8 exercises

Rhythm

The pulse

A training log for rhythm: every section is a short drill with a measurement. You find out how evenly you tap, which way you drift without a metronome, and what groups you hear in identical clicks.

≈ 40 min 🎯 9 exercises 07

Note values, bars and the piano roll

Notes can be long or short, but "long" is not a measurement. Here a whole note splits into halves, quarters, eighths and sixteenths, the notes fill up bars, and all of it turns out to be the same thing as the rectangles in the piano roll of any DAW.

≈ 40 min 🎯 7 exercises 08

Rests, dots and metres

A dance hall: a march, a waltz and a jig. You feel a metre in your body before you see it on the page, from which beats are louder. Along the way music learns to keep quiet: rests, dots, ties and the pickup.

≈ 40 min 🎯 10 exercises 09

Groove

A drum workshop: the sixteen cells of a drum machine, Joplin's ragtime, swing in percent and a quantiser that tidies up your own playing. Every groove teaches one idea.

≈ 40 min 🎯 8 exercises

Reading

The staff and the treble clef

A piano roll shows everything, but it won't fit on a sheet of paper. Fold it into five lines, find G on them, and learn to read notes by their shape, as quickly as you read words.

≈ 40 min 🎯 10 exercises 11

Semitones, sharps and flats

Every black key has two names, and so do some white ones. Where sharps and flats come from, why the same key can be written two ways, and why an octave has twelve keys rather than seven or twenty.

≈ 40 min 🎯 8 exercises 12

Bass clef and two hands

The treble clef is one bank of the river, the bass clef the other, and middle C is the bridge between them. Cross it, learn to read the left hand's notes and split the keyboard the way a synth does: bass on the left, tune on the right.

≈ 40 min 🎯 8 exercises

The ear

Intervals

You recognise a tune from any starting note because the ear remembers the steps between the notes: the intervals. Here you learn to count them on the keys, recognise them by ear and see why a fifth sounds smooth and a second rough.

≈ 40 min 🎯 8 exercises 14

Major and minor

An experiment with one variable: the same white keys, and only the note the ear takes for home changes. Out of that grow major, minor, the pull towards the tonic and an answer to why some tunes sound happy and others sad.

≈ 40 min 🎯 10 exercises 15

Chords

This chapter builds a smart key: you press one note and it plays a chord. Along the way each of its settings gets explained: thirds, the four kinds of triad, inversions, the seventh and the primary chords of a key.

≈ 45 min 🎯 9 exercises

Playing

Playing from the page

You can already play from notes one at a time. Playing them at tempo, at first sight and without stopping, is another skill. This chapter is set up as a rehearsal: three pieces, three passes each, finger numbers above the notes and an eye that runs ahead of the hands.

≈ 45 min 🎯 7 exercises 17

Playing by ear

A tune is going round in your head and there is no sheet music for it. You find it on the keys the way a detective finds a culprit, from the clues: the first note, the direction, the size of the steps, the rhythm, the tonic.

≈ 40 min 🎯 9 exercises

Writing music

Motif and phrase

How to write a tune: a workshop with rules. Only three notes, repeat and change one thing, end on the tonic. The widget plays what you made straight away, and by the end of the chapter an eight-bar tune of your own is in the Notebook.

≈ 45 min 🎯 10 exercises 19

Harmony and bass

Four chords that thousands of songs rest on, and how to find your own for a tune of your own. Then a bass goes in under the chords: from one note a bar to a part that hits together with the kick.

≈ 45 min 🎯 10 exercises 20

Arrangement

The tune, the chords, the bass and the beat are ready, yet together they sound like mud. One day in the studio: an empty project, an hour per track, and every track gets its own job, its own frequency range and its own synth sound.

≈ 50 min 🎯 8 exercises 21

Your own track

The final chapter: your whole track, a checklist and a guide to the studio. We check the track, play over it, export a MIDI file for any DAW and a WAV for your friends, and finish by building a month of practice from your own results.

≈ 45 min 🎯 6 exercises

Six big questions

The course asks them in the first chapter and answers them along the way.

Why do a high C and a low C sound like “the same note”? Answered in chapter 01 →
What makes a violin sound different from a flute on the same note? Answered in chapter 02 →
Why are there exactly twelve notes? Answered in chapter 11 →
Why do some tunes sound happy and others sad? Answered in chapter 14 →
Is there such a thing as “no ear for music”? Answered in chapter 13 →
What is a song that gets stuck in your head made of? Answered in chapter 18 →

Six skills the course trains

Sound

Understand what a synth makes a timbre from, and shape your own.

Playing

Find notes without looking, play from the page in time, pick out a tune.

Rhythm

Keep the pulse without a click, read and write rhythms, feel a groove.

Notes

Read treble and bass clefs, accidentals and the piano roll.

Ear

Tell pitches apart, recognise intervals, modes and chords, hear the tonic.

Writing

Come up with a motif and a phrase, find harmony and a bass line, build a track.

Notebook

Your track, growing with the course: in chapter 03 it starts as a recording from the keyboard; by the end it holds a tune, a bass line, chords, drums and your own sounds. It lives in the browser and exports to MIDI and WAV.

📓 Notebook →

Trainers

The skill of every chapter can be drilled on its own, level by level. Trainers remember what you get wrong and ask it more often.

🎯 Trainers →

How to practise

A little every day: 15 minutes with a trainer do more than an hour once a week.
In ear exercises, answer with your ears first and only then look at the keys.
No MIDI keyboard? The computer keyboard works the same: the A S D F… row is the white keys, the row above is the black ones, C and V change the velocity.
Rhythm in a browser depends on audio latency. Chapter 00 has a calibration: two minutes, and the rhythm exercises will be fair.