PianGo for piano teachers

The fingering you pencil onto a student's score every week, worked out automatically for any piece they already own — and drawn onto the keys so they can see the shape of the hand at home.

Last updated 23 September 2026.

What it does today, free

• Plans fingering for the whole piece. Every step is scored against Parncutt's ergonomic span rules — stretches, thumb on black keys, crossings, hand shifts — and a Viterbi pass picks the cheapest sequence through the entire score rather than deciding note by note. Fingerings already printed in the file are kept exactly as the editor wrote them.
• Draws the hands on the keys. Those assignments drive an animated hand overlay, so a beginner sees a hand shape rather than a small number above a note.
• Takes the music your student already has. MusicXML (.musicxml, .xml, .mxl) and MIDI (.mid) are read exactly — chords, ties, both staves, printed fingering. MuseScore exports both, and most sheet-music sites offer MusicXML.
• Listens at an acoustic piano. Microphone pitch detection with a spectral check so chords register, plus a fresh-strike test so a ringing note cannot skip the step ahead. A MIDI keyboard works too, over Web MIDI in Chrome or Edge.
• Waits, or plays along. Wait-for-me mode holds the step until the note is right. Play-along runs at tempo with a five-second count-in.
• Speaks your student's language. English, 简体中文, 日本語, 한국어, Spanish, French, German and Brazilian Portuguese — including song titles and composer credits, with search matching either spelling.
• Fifty-six pieces built in, graded beginner, intermediate and advanced, including a boogie-woogie and blues progression from first steps to rolling octaves.

Using it in a lesson

A few things it is genuinely good for, based on what it can actually do:

• Settling a fingering argument. Export the passage as MusicXML, open it, and look at what the planner proposes for the awkward bar. You will often disagree — but it gives the student something concrete to react to between lessons.
• The student with no keyboard at home yet. The on-screen keys and the microphone mean they can work on note-reading and hand shape on a laptop before the instrument arrives.
• Students who do not read English. Switching the interface language also switches titles and credits, which matters more than it sounds for younger beginners.
• Sending a piece home without a login. There is no account to set up, no trial to expire, and nothing for a parent to pay for.

What is honestly missing

Being straight about this is more useful to you than a feature list.

• No accounts, so nothing is saved. Close the tab and the session is gone. No progress, no history, no streak.
• No assignments and no teacher dashboard. You cannot set work or see whether it was done. This is the main thing we are building.
• Photos and PDFs are not automatic yet. During the beta you email a photo or PDF to sheets@piango.app and we convert it by hand and add it to the library, free. If you need automatic scanning today, Soundslice does it properly and has since 2022.
• No student recordings. Nothing is captured and sent back to you.
• Web MIDI needs Chrome or Edge. The microphone works in any modern browser.

What we are building, and what it will cost

The next thing is the smallest useful version of teacher accounts: a teacher account, a student invite link, assign a piece, and see whether it was practised. Not a curriculum, not messaging, not scheduling — My Music Staff already does scheduling properly and we would rather do one thing well.

Students will never pay. The plan is that teachers pay by the number of students they have active in a month:

Questions teachers ask