Free demo
Free piano sight-reading test
Eight bars, one attempt. A freshly generated phrase, a count-in, and a click that will not wait for you — then a breakdown of what actually went wrong. Nothing is saved because you are not signed in; create a free account to keep a skill profile and a streak.
Sight-reading
🙌 both hands1 chords
Click anywhere on the staff to move the playhead, then Preview to hear the passage from there.
Preview routine
Work through this every time. It is what separates a confident first attempt from a hesitant one.
- Key signatureWhich sharps or flats apply — and does the signature change part-way?
- Meter & tempoHow many beats per bar, and how fast is the click?
- Hand positionFind the first note and settle your hand before beat one.
- Rhythm hazardsSpot the busiest bar now, not when you arrive at it.
- PatternsScales, arpeggios and repeats — name the shapes you can see.
- ShapeWhere does the line rise, fall and resolve?
This passage
- Progressions
- Primary cadence · Predominant expansion
- Shapes
- Scale fragments, Mixed figures, Arpeggios, Broken chords, Small skips, Leap + recovery
- Left hand
- Block chords, Root–fifth–octave
- Chords
- 1, up to 3 notes
- Widest leap
- 9 semitones
- Input
- Unplugged
- Hear it back
- every 2 bars
Nothing is listening, so nothing here will be scored. The click will stop every few bars to play back what you have just read — judge it against what you played.
What this test measures
A single accuracy percentage cannot tell you what to practise, because playing a wrong note and playing the right note a beat late are different problems with different fixes. The run is scored across five weighted dimensions instead, and the one that scored worst is your bottleneck.
- Rhythm30%
- Did your notes land when they were written to land?
- Pitch25%
- Were they the right notes, in the right octave?
- Continuity20%
- Did you keep moving, or were there gaps?
- Structure15%
- Did the strong beats and the shape of the phrase survive?
- Recovery10%
- After a mistake, how quickly were you back with the beat?
Rhythm and continuity together outweigh pitch, deliberately. A wrong note played in time is a better performance than a right note that arrives after the music has moved on — and a reader who stops to find the correct note is rehearsing the one habit that ruins performances.
How the test works
Preview
The phrase appears with its key, meter and tempo. Scan it for hand position, rhythm, patterns and anything awkward — not to start reading bar one. Take as long as you like; nothing starts until you say so.
Play it once
After the count-in the click starts and does not stop. Miss something, let it go, and keep playing. Connect a MIDI keyboard to have every note graded, or read it unplugged on whatever piano you have.
Read the diagnosis
Your five scores, your biggest bottleneck, your strongest dimension, and the specific drill to practise next.
The phrase is generated fresh every time, so there is nothing to memorise and no way to game the result. Playing again gives you music you have not seen — which is the only way to test reading rather than recall.
Before you play
- No account, no download and no card. Nothing from this run is saved.
- A MIDI keyboard over USB, in Chrome or Edge, is what makes the five scores possible: every note you play reaches the app, so pitch and rhythm are measured rather than estimated.
- Without one, set your input to Unplugged. The click, the scrolling score and the preview all work the same — nothing is graded, and the drill plays your bars back to you every few bars instead so you can judge them yourself.
- This test is eight bars in G major at 66bpm — about 29 seconds — reading both hands together: a melody of steps, skips and leaps over a left hand of marching basses and block chords. It is pitched to find your bottleneck rather than to be easy, so expect one dimension to score well below the others. That one is the answer.
Once you know your bottleneck
Each of these guides is free and needs no account.