By
Jason Snell
December 6, 2024 5:12 PM PT
I took piano lessons when I was a kid, and always hated practicing. I can blame it on the cold room we kept the piano in, but part of the reason I hated it was that most of what I played was boring. (I didn’t love having to take a long school bus ride to my piano lessons, either.)
This week I took Simply Piano for Vision Pro for a spin, and it was anything from boring. The popular iPad app for teaching piano has come to Vision Pro, and so I sat down at the very same piano I used to practice on as a kid—it’s in a somewhat warmer room now—but with a Vision Pro over my head.
Simply Piano works by listening to you playing notes and detecting if you’re playing the right or wrong ones. It’s very clever, but the Vision Pro version adds in the ability to overlay a virtual keyboard on your real one, so it can provide visual cues (in the form of glowing notes) when you’re not sure which key to play. It also annotates your fingers, so you can see which fingers are supposed to play which notes.
Even all these years later, I’ve got sight reading skills above Simply Piano’s introductory lessons, but as I went through the introductory lessons I found that the visual augmentation did feel a bit like magic. If I had any complaints, it was that sometimes Simply Piano struggled to recognize when I was playing notes, especially two of the same note in quick succession.
The Vision Pro app also comes with a virtual keyboard feature that allows you to practice on any flat surface, by overlaying a keyboard and letting you play it. I like this idea a lot, but in practice I found that it didn’t work very well. It played incorrect notes and even played notes when my fingers weren’t down. I think there’s something here—and having the ability to practice piano when you don’t have a keyboard handy is an amazing idea!—but I gave up pretty quickly and went back to my real piano.
Maybe if I had an iPad, or a Vision Pro, I would’ve practiced the piano more faithfully back in the day. Or maybe not. But this app seems to do a pretty great job of teaching the basics of piano, no teacher (or long school bus ride) required.
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