Tips and tricks
Small habits and hidden features that make practice smoother.
⇒ Use the app in full-screen mode
Press F11 (Chrome) on the practice page. In full screen the menu and footer auto-hide, so the whole screen belongs to the exercise — move the mouse to the top or bottom edge to reveal them.
⇒ Learn a few keyboard shortcuts
⇒ Toggle the key without touching the mouse
Q/W step the key chromatically (half steps), A/S walk the circle of fifths. Great for drilling one chord shape through every key.
⇒ Use the app on your mobile device
No piano at hand? The Naming and Ear training activities work entirely on-screen — pick them in Preferences and quiz yourself on the bus.
⇒ Add an app shortcut to your home screen
Android Chrome: menu ⋮ → Add to Home screen. iPhone/iPad Safari: Share → Add to Home Screen. PianoKitty then opens full-screen like a native app.
⇒ Add your practice to your calendar
The reminder arrives as a notification or an e-mail. A calendar event is separate and sits among your other plans. Open Preferences → Notifications, press Book the practice time and choose Google Calendar, Apple Calendar (a .ics file) or Outlook. You need to be signed in.
The event lasts 30 minutes and starts at the time set under Remind me at a set time, or at 19:00 while the reminder time is on Automatic. Google and Apple Calendar repeat it daily; Outlook gets a single event that you set to repeat there. Changing the reminder time later does not move the event, so edit it in your calendar.
⇒ Keep your notes in the Notepad
The Dashboard Notepad is a free-form scratchpad that syncs with your account — song ideas, YouTube tutorial links, teacher remarks. Paste a link and it stays clickable.
⇒ Turn a song you found online into an exercise
On a Chordify song page, one bookmarklet click sends the chords straight into the editor — in order as a progression, as the unique set of chords the song uses (a drill pool), or converted to Roman numerals. On an Ultimate Guitar chords page, one bookmarklet sends the chords with the song's sections. Grab them from the Bookmarklets page.
⇒ Send interesting pages to the Notepad with a bookmarklet
Drag the Note in PianoKitty bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar — one click on any page (a tutorial, a chord sheet) puts its title and link at the top of your Notepad. More power tools live on the Bookmarklets page.
⇒ Build daily practice routines with lists
Collect exercises into Lists — a warm-up list, a scales list, a repertoire list — and play a whole list in order on /app. One click starts the day's routine.
A list item does not have to be a PianoKitty drill. Paste a YouTube link, a photo of the score, a PDF, or just a title and a description, and the player shows that in place of the exercise — so a routine can mix drilling with watching and reading. Drag items to reorder them, untick Active to park one without deleting it, and use Quick add to paste a whole routine at once, one exercise per line.
⇒ Put a timer on a list exercise
Give a list item a value in Minutes and it becomes a timed station: a ring counts down next to it, and when the time runs out a gong sounds and the list moves to the next exercise by itself. On the last item the list finishes instead.
That turns a list into a hands-free practice plan — 25 minutes of Hanon, 10 minutes of scales, 15 minutes of repertoire — with nothing to click between stations, which is exactly what you want when your hands are on the keys. An item can also carry its own Tempo with Metronome autostart: selecting it sets the exercise tempo and starts the click for you. Quick add reads both inline, so the line
Hanon nr 1 25 min 120 bpmsets the timer and the tempo while it creates the item. Re-selecting the exercise you are already on restarts its countdown — the quick way to take a station from the top.⇒ Send exercises and lists as assignments
Every exercise and list has a share link — send it to your students or friends and they land in exactly the same drill. Your shared links live under My links.
⇒ Record chords to play (R)
Press R on /app with a MIDI keyboard connected, play a chord sequence, press R again — the recording becomes a playable exercise on the Songs subject.
⇒ Record melodies to play (Shift+R)
Shift+R records single notes instead of chords — capture a melody and practice it note by note (Songs subject, single-note mode). No MIDI keyboard? You can type the note names in yourself.
⇒ Transpose songs and progressions
On the Songs and Progressions subjects the key-step shortcuts transpose the material: Q/W by a half step, A/S by a perfect fifth. Learn a song in an easy key first, then walk it up.
⇒ Play a long exercise in chunks
A whole seven-degree chart is a lot to hold at once. Turn on Play in chunks in Preferences (Scales subject, played in order) and the app hands you a few chords at a time: Chunk length sets how many, 2 through 7, and every flawless pass moves you along. A missed note only resets the loop counter — you never lose the ground you have already won.
Chunk advance mode decides how it moves. Cumulative adds one chord per pass (C → CD → CDE …), so the exercise grows under your fingers. Window slides a fixed-size frame forward instead (CDE → DEF → GAB …), so the load stays constant while the material changes.
⇒ Shrink any exercise to the chords you keep missing
Click chords in the chart strip on /app and only those get drilled. It is the fastest way to go after the two chords that keep breaking a progression, it needs no options set, and it works anywhere the chart is shown. Click a chord again to release it.
The selection is cleared on a key change by default. Chart selection on key change in Preferences lets you keep it instead — handy for walking the same three chords through all twelve keys.
To narrow the material for good rather than for one session, use Chord types in Preferences and leave only the qualities you want ticked. Clicking a group heading selects or clears that whole group at once.
Chunks and manual selection are two answers to the same problem, so they do not stack: clicking a chart chord while Play in chunks is on keeps the chunk you had reached as an ordinary selection and switches the option off.
⇒ Ninja mode: drill the exact voicing you choose
Turn on Ninja mode at the bottom of the chords tab in Preferences (Piano practice only) and pick the exact steps each hand plays on a two-row grid — the left hand two octaves below, the right at the root, with real tensions up to the 13th (
♭9,♯11,♭13…). When your pattern matches a known chord, its name shows under the grid.The question then shows only the root — "C", not "Cmaj7" — because you defined what C means. The keyboard hint marks both hands (left in darker orange) as a suggested fingering, but grading is octave-free: play every chosen note with either hand, in whatever octave is comfortable. Octave doublings count — tick
1and8and two different C keys are expected. This is the tool for jazz shells (left root + right 3-5-7), quartal stacks, or any voicing a chord symbol can't say precisely.⇒ Chord editor: Ctrl-click a chord to change its inversion
In the Chords Editor text box, Ctrl-click a chord to cycle its inversion in place:
C→C.1→C.2→ back toC. Seventh chords go one step further —G7reachesG7.3— because they have a third inversion. Re-voice a whole progression without typing a single dot.⇒ Simplify dense chords with rootless voicings
A thirteenth chord has more notes than you have fingers, and in a band the bass player has the root anyway. Turn on Rootless chords in Preferences and the root is dropped from what the app expects — a C major question is answered by E + G alone.
This is how jazz pianists actually voice the left hand, and it puts the big extended chords within reach long before you can stretch the full stack. While it is on, inversion strictness is suspended (the lowest non-root note counts as the bass), and single-note questions are unaffected.
⇒ Split the keyboard
Press / and pick a split point — only one side of the keyboard is graded while the other stays free (for a teacher demonstrating, a second player, or your own accompaniment).
⇒ Practice rhythm with the Jumper game (J)
Press J to flip into the Jumper game — play the chord ON the beat to jump over obstacles. The metronome becomes a game and your timing gets honest feedback.
⇒ Specify inversions with dot notation
In the editor and the Progressions input, add
.1/.2/.3to force an inversion:V.2,Am.1,I.2 V vi.2 IV. Root position is the bare symbol.⇒ Combine PianoKitty with other great tools
Practice gets richer with company: play chords over an online drum machine, build free backing tracks, or dig into theory sites and ear-training apps. Our curated list of favorites lives on the Resources page.
⇒ Use a drum backing instead of the metronome
For more fun, practice over a drum loop instead of the plain click. A groove makes the beat feel alive, so chords start to sound like music and you want to play for longer. Pick a pattern in one of the drum machines on the Resources page, set it to the tempo you use in the app, and play your chords on the beat. It works well with Jumper too. Keep the metronome for the first slow run-through, then switch to the drums.
⇒ Use the app in full screen
Go full screen to hide the browser bars and keep only the exercise in view, a simple focus mode. In Chrome press F11 (on a Mac, Ctrl+Cmd+F) and press it again to leave.
⇒ Keep the streak alive