Top 10 Best Piano Apps in the UK 2020 (Yousician, Simply Piano and More)

It’s a bone of contention among many piano teachers – can an app really teach you to play to an expert level? The answer, as it so often is, is that it’s in the way that you use it. The important thing is that it helps you develop a knowledge of chords, scales, and music theory, rather than simply imitating what is being played on screen. 

It’s hard not to feel a bit of a buzz when you learn to play one of your favourite songs, and it’s all too easy for an app to take advantage of this to convince a beginner that they’ve very quickly learned to play, when in actuality all they’ve done is mimic without acquiring any deeper knowledge. 

Any decent piano tutorial will balance lessons on several different topics and encourage you to acquire a truly robust piano playing ability. 

Lessons with a good teacher are, of course, an incredibly effective method of learning the piano and, in an ideal world, everyone would be able to combine using their piano app with face-to-face lessons. However, for those unable, or reluctant, to pay out for lessons, piano apps offer an excellent substitute.

Finding an app isn’t the difficult part – there are tons of options out there for fledgling pianists. The hard part is finding one that’s worth dedicating your precious time to. In this buying guide, we’ll explain what makes one app more suited to one player than another, and help you find your perfect piano partner.

The first thing to do is to ensure that the app's lessons are appropriate for your experience level. Luckily, most apps allow for varying levels of experience by featuring lessons that gradually progress in difficulty, or they give you the ability to adjust it. But that doesn’t mean that some apps don’t cater more heavily towards beginners or advanced players.

Because the majority of piano apps market themselves on their ability to make the piano accessible, most of them cater primarily to beginners by taking things from the ground up and starting from scratch with the absolute basics.

If you are a complete beginner, look out for apps which begin by getting you to play individual piano keys, before combining them to make chords and encouraging you to play with both hands at the same time. 

But perhaps the best thing about modern piano apps is that you’ll get instant feedback – they'll listen to your playing and immediately congratulate you or correct you, depending on whether you played the right notes or not. You won’t progress until the app is sure you’re ready, and you’ll never find yourself in over your head!

Just as piano apps are great for getting adult novices into playing the piano, they’re also great for encouraging kids, and many apps designed for beginners will work just as well for children as they do for adults. 

Their colourful, user-friendly interfaces and elements of gamification ensure that these apps make learning the piano as easy and as fun as possible for kids, and many of them even feature collections of songs designed specifically for children. 

Let’s face it, you’re much more likely to convince your child to sit down with an iPad than you are a piano teacher! 

Apps that take more experienced players into consideration aren't as easy to identify, but they do exist. The best first step is to read through the app’s description in the app store. Most apps will use this space to appeal to beginners, so you’ll need to look a little closer to find out if any advanced lessons are included. 

If an app promises to teach you more advanced skills such as playing arpeggio or sight reading, you can feel a little more confident that you won’t soon find yourself unchallenged as an advanced player. 

Another useful way of discerning the level that you can attain with an app is to check out its song list. If you spot Mozart in the list, you can feel more assured that you’ll progress past playing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’.

There are many aspects to learning the piano, and sometimes it’s not so easy to determine your level. You may excel in one area while finding another frustratingly difficult, for example. Luckily, there are apps which, rather than aiming to give you a broad skill set, focus specifically on a single area.

There are, for example, apps that will allow you to perfect your sight-reading abilities by encouraging you to find notes and play them on your piano as quickly as possible. 

If you know what your weak areas are, it makes sense to put extra effort into ironing out the creases – and because many of these apps are designed to be as fun as possible, you’ll have a whale of a time doing it! 

Learning to play the piano can be a time-consuming activity. If you’re fully committed to becoming a virtuoso, you’ll find ways to make space in your life for tinkling the ivories, but if you’re just looking to have fun, you may benefit from something more casual. Here's how to find an app whose learning style adapts well to the pace of your life. 

They come without the commitment of meeting at a specific time every week, but many piano apps seek to successfully recreate the structure that you get when learning with a piano tutor. Each ‘lesson’ is dedicated to a specific subject – you’ll work on your new skill and, once you’ve successfully mastered it, you’ll progress to the next.

It’s not a hard and fast rule, but because they require you to practice new skills, these apps usually require you sit at the piano for longer periods of time in order to properly absorb new concepts. This learning style is less suited to those who like to dip in and out as and when, which is worth considering if you have other commitments in your life. 

Of course, time spent at the piano is not lost time, and the pay off is that you’ll eventually become an accomplished player – but it’s up to you whether this is worth it.

Those with busier lives, or those looking for more casual ways to learn the piano, should consider apps which utilise short snappy games. Piano Dust Buster, for example, is a fun game which encourages you to press the notes displayed on-screen in order to ‘dust granny’s piano’ – through doing so, you’ll learn a series of popular songs!

These apps are ideal for more casual learners because they require very little time commitment. Games are short and fun (meaning you’ll probably end up playing more anyway!) and the learning happens in the background, meaning the idea of sitting down to learn the piano will feel less of a chore at the end of a busy day.

What if you’re situated somewhere in the middle – a dedicated pianist who is also committed to juggling a busy life? If this sounds like you, you may benefit from a ‘piano simulator’, a new breed of piano app that imitates a piano so you can practice on-the-go. 

Apps like Perfect Piano, for example, give you the entire set of 88 keys, and allow you to practice chords and popular songs of varying difficulties during your commute. It’s not quite the same, but it’s a highly effective way of filling in the gaps while you’re away from your real piano! 

Learning to play the piano should be as fun as possible, and this isn’t lost on most app developers. High-quality apps use attractive designs and gamification to increase your motivation, but some go the extra mile and add innovative features that’ll ensure you’re repeatedly drawn to your piano stool.

Some of the bigger names feature extensive libraries of popular and classical songs that continue to expand. It’s always a good idea to play music that you enjoy, so if you spot your favourite artist in an app’s song roster, it may well be worth a download. 

Badges and scores, too, are an effective way of allowing you to monitor your progress while driving you to practice even harder. The fun factor really increases, however, when online elements are introduced, and you have the ability to compete with other players and get to the top of the leaderboard – you wouldn’t get that with a piano teacher! 

A final word that will interest multi-instrumentalists – there are apps out there that’ll let you learn multiple instruments. As well as piano, some apps can also teach you how to sing and play the guitar, bass, and ukulele (sorry one-man bands, not simultaneously!). 

You’ll usually be required to pay an increased subscription cost, but those wanting to learn several instruments will almost certainly save money in the long run.

After learning a little more about what’s out there, you can rest a little more assured that there’s a piano app that’ll perfectly fit your experience and preferences. Read on, where we count down the top 10 best piano apps available to download immediately in the UK.

Once you’ve downloaded a great piano app and begun to improve your skills, you may find that you’ve outgrown your dusty old keyboard and it’s time for an upgrade. We’ve got you covered! Read on to find out about the best digital pianos and MIDI keyboards available and, for when you need to eliminate distractions, the best wireless earbuds.

Now that there are several great apps available, it’s incredibly easy to start playing the piano. Just as an apple a day is good for the body, a daily piano session can be great for the soul. We hope that our buying guide has encouraged you to pick up a habit that'll greatly enrich your life.

Author: Ben Willimett