Perfect Piano

Review by eFreeware

The people most likely to want Perfect Piano are those who have a phone or tablet within reach and want to make music on it without buying an instrument first. Revontulet Soft has built an 88-key keyboard that runs on Android devices, with a bank of piano and keyboard sounds behind it, and that combination covers a lot of ground: learning a song, sketching an idea, recording a short piece or playing against someone online.

What makes the app interesting to me is that it is not only a keyboard. There is a practice side with thousands of scores and several ways to be guided through them, a recording side with a metronome and file sharing, and a social side where players meet, chat and compete. Those are three different reasons to open the same app, and the developer has bundled them together rather than picking one.

It is free to install and supported by ads, with in-app purchases also available. With more than 100 million installs and a 4.2 average from over a million ratings, it is clearly being used by a large number of people, which is worth weighing when you decide whether to give it a place on your home screen.

Learning songs instead of hunting for sheet music

The part I would expect most new players to live in is the score library. The developer describes thousands of popular pieces, and the app can present each one in three different ways: falling notes, a waterfall view, or conventional music notation on a stave. That third option matters if you already read music, while the first two are friendlier if you do not and would rather follow shapes moving toward the keys.

Practice is adjustable in the ways you would hope for. You can set the left and right hand separately, slow the tempo down or speed it up, change the difficulty, and loop a section between two points until it sticks. There are also three play modes: the app can play a piece for you, play along with you, or pause at each note and wait for you to find it. That last mode is the closest thing here to a patient teacher, because nothing moves until you press the right key.

The one thing I would keep in mind is that this is a simulator, not a substitute for an instrument with weighted keys. Playing on glass is a different physical experience from playing on a real action, and the app cannot change that. As a way to learn where the notes are and to build the habit of practicing, though, the guidance tools look well thought out.

Playing, recording and sharing what you make

The keyboard itself is more configurable than the basic layout suggests. You get the full 88 keys, multitouch support and force touch, and you can change the width of the keyboard to suit the screen you are on. There are single-row and double-row layouts, a mode for two people playing at once, and a chords mode for accompaniment. On a tablet the wider layouts make more sense; on a phone the narrower ones keep the keys reachable.

The sound set covers more than a single grand piano. Grand piano and bright piano are there, along with music box, pipe organ, Rhodes and synthesizer, and further instruments arrive as free plug-ins: bass, electric guitar, wooden guitar, flute, saxophone, electronic keyboard, violin, chord, xylophone and harp. The most recent update added distortion, reverb and echo effects, which is a sensible addition for anyone shaping a tone rather than just playing notes.

Recording is handled in MIDI or AAC, and a finished take can be shared directly or set as a ringtone. There is a metronome for keeping time, and the app supports low-latency audio through OpenSL ES, which the developer marks as a beta feature. For capturing a quick idea or a practice run, that set of tools is enough to be useful without turning the app into a full studio.

Playing alongside other people online

Perfect Piano also has a connected side. You can play with other players around the world, chat with them in real time, join or create guilds and take part in a weekly challenge built around a new song, with a ranking to show how you did. For anyone who finds solo practice hard to sustain, a weekly target and a group to compare notes with can be the difference between a habit and a novelty.

I would treat the social layer as the part with the most variance in experience, simply because it depends on who else is around and how active the guilds are. The app gives you the room to meet people and a reason to come back each week; what you get out of it will depend on the crowd you land among.

It is worth saying that this side of the app is entirely optional. The multiplayer features can be treated as an extra rather than the main event.

What you need before the keyboard appears

For most people, getting started is simply a matter of installing the app on a phone or tablet. The keyboard is on screen, the sounds are built in, and the score library is there to browse. The free instrument plug-ins download and install from within the app when you want a different tone.

The one setup step with real requirements is external keyboard support. The app works with standard General MIDI keyboards over USB, including models such as the YAMAHA P105, Roland F-120 and Xkey. To use that, your Android device needs version 3.1 or higher, USB Host support and a USB OTG cable. If you have a digital piano or a small MIDI controller and the right cable, the app can act as the sound source and recording tool for it, and you can play, record and compete through the external keys.

That combination is the most interesting configuration to me. A real keyboard for feel, the app for sounds, scores and recording, and a phone or tablet as the engine. It is not a setup everyone owns, but for those who do, it turns a spare instrument into something you can practice with and share from.

Where Perfect Piano fits and where it does not

This is a good fit for a beginner working through popular songs at their own pace, for a hobbyist who wants a keyboard available whenever an idea arrives, and for anyone with a MIDI keyboard who wants a flexible sound source and a way to record what they play. It also suits people who like a bit of structure and company: the weekly challenge and guilds give practice a social shape that a standalone keyboard app cannot.

It is a less obvious fit for someone who already plays at a high level and wants a deep production tool. The recording formats are MIDI and AAC, the effects are the ones the developer has added, and the focus is on playing and learning rather than mixing and arranging. That is a deliberate scope, and it is worth being clear about before you install.

The app is free, with ads and in-app purchases. For a keyboard with this many sounds, guidance options and connected features, that seems a reasonable one, provided you are comfortable with the advertising side of a free app.

A keyboard worth keeping on your phone

Perfect Piano earns a place on a device because it does several jobs competently rather than one job exhaustively. The 88 keys, the adjustable layouts, the range of sounds and the score library with multiple guidance modes cover learning and playing; the metronome, recording and sharing cover capturing what you play; the online side covers playing with other people.

Install it if you want to learn piano pieces on the screen you already carry, or if you have a MIDI keyboard and want something to plug it into. The external keyboard route needs Android 3.1 or higher, USB Host and an OTG cable, so check that before you plan around it. Everyone else can start with the on-screen keys and the score library and see how far that takes them.

It is not the tool for studio-grade production. As a free way to learn, play and share piano on Android, though, it is easy to see why so many people have installed it.

What's new in version 8.0.0

1. Add distortion, reverb, echo sound SFX settings. 2. Add MusicXML support.