What you need
- A digital piano or keyboard that connects to a computer. Almost any instrument with a USB port works: plug it into your computer with the same cable you'd use for a printer (USB-B to USB-A/C on most pianos). No drivers, no extra software. Your manual may call this port MIDI or "USB to Host".
- Chrome, Edge, or Firefox. Clef listens to your playing through the browser's built-in support for talking to instruments (Web MIDI). Safari doesn't have it, so it won't work, and neither will any browser on iPhone or iPad.
- A laptop or desktop. Clef is built for a computer on or near your piano. There is no mobile or tablet app yet: on iPhone and iPad, no browser can reach a piano at all, so that part is out of Clef's hands for now.
Acoustic pianos without that connection aren't supported. Clef needs to know the exact notes you played and when, and only a direct connection to the instrument provides that reliably.
Your first five minutes
- Create an account with email and password, or continue with Google.
- Run the setup wizard. Clef finds your keyboard, and you confirm it's the right one by pressing a key.
- Play the soundcheck. A ~20-second play-along confirms everything works: you play a few notes of a familiar melody and watch them turn green on screen, including one deliberate wrong note, so you see what red feedback looks like before it ever matters.
Practicing a piece
Pick a piece and the sheet music appears on screen. Clef hears every note: play what's written and the score lights up green and moves forward; play a wrong note and it's marked in red at the exact spot it happened. Chords tolerate a little rolling, so you don't have to strike every note at the same instant.
The controls are deliberately minimal. Reset starts the piece over and Reveal shows you the notes when you're stuck. That's it. The point is playing, not fiddling.
Memorizing a piece
Clef's core feature turns a piece into short from-memory challenges:
- You see the previous bar as a reminder, then play the next bar without looking at the notes. Clef tells you instantly whether you had it.
- New material gets a gentle guided first pass with the score visible before you're ever tested on it.
- Miss a bar? You re-practice that spot until you can play it cleanly twice in a row, then move on.
- Every few bars, you play the whole stretch you've just learned in one run. Each stretch overlaps the last, so the parts weld together into a performance rather than a stack of fragments.
Each memorized bar comes back for review right before you'd start to forget it: the proven spaced-repetition method, applied to your hands instead of vocabulary.
The daily rhythm
Sessions are bounded: each day has a cap on new material and ends in an explicit "done for today" screen with your streak. When you come back, a Continue card tells you what's due and roughly how long it will take. A practice heatmap shows the habit building week by week.
Choosing a piece
The catalog is deliberately curated, spanning Bach to Rachmaninoff, each piece carefully engraved and with a linked performance video where available. You canbrowse the whole library before you sign up. If the piece you want isn't there, request it from inside the app and vote on other requests. The catalog grows along the votes, and right now most requests are engraved and published within a day.
Something not working?
Check the Help / FAQ page, where connection issues are covered, or write to [email protected].