I'm excited to announce the upcoming launch of AudioTheory Piano Keys – an interactive toolkit designed to enrich your understanding of piano music theory.
AudioTheory Guitars... but with a piano?
I've been developing the AudioTheory software range for a couple of years now, and AudioTheory Piano Keys is a somewhat logical continuation of ideas I've been exploring in the currently available AudioTheory Guitars.
This application has an extensive library of interactive chords and providing the same thing for piano chords makes a lot of sense. However, with AudioTheory Guitars you've also got the fretboard component and other tools optimised for transposition. My goal has been to provide piano-specific tools along these lines, so AudioTheory Piano Keys will be launching with a couple of brand new innovative features designed for visually explaining how the music you're playing works.
The Scale Wheel
The first of these is the Scale Wheel. This is a circular diagram that visually shows how notes fit into scales. This works by locking the root note of the scale to the 12 o'clock position allowing the focus to be on the relationship between the notes.
It's a really useful way to understand how all scales of the same type follow the same pattern. The root note meanwhile is interchangeable and can be adjusted by spinning the wheel around as desired.
Real-time scale highlighting
The idea here is to show how a note that's played fits into two scales at the same time. And also in real time! This is one of the application's more advanced features, but once you've got your head around the concept, it's an extremely powerful tool for helping write new songs or playing captivating progressions when improvising.
This works by having a second row of notes above the main piano. You can load the song key to the main display and then this second row shows the scale for the note that is currently being pressed. By default this filters against both scales, essentially meaning that the second row is showing you the subsection of notes that are both in the main song key and also in the key of the current note being played.
Of course alongside this you have all the useful features for note highlighting, viewing and playing scales and customising the application view with preset options for different compositions. The store page for AudioTheory Piano Keys is now live which means now is the perfect time to add it to your wishlist:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1513510/AudioTheory_Piano_Keys
Currently there is no fixed released date as I'm still implementing the finishing touches, however I anticipate AudioTheory Piano Keys launching in approximately 3–6 months. Please look forward to this release!