Clefsight No keyboard

How Clefsight works

How your playing is graded, how your reading profile decides what comes next, and what a keyboard can't tell us.

How we grade

Your own beat
We grade your timing against your own beat, not the metronome. Play slower or faster than the marked tempo and, as long as you keep it steady, every note can still be on time. If your tempo drifts, we follow it; that shows up in Steadiness, not as late or early notes.
Notes
Each written note you played with the right key counts. A wrong key in the right place is a wrong note; a note you didn't play is missed; a note that isn't in the music is extra, and counts as half a wrong note.
Rhythm
A note is on time within a tenth of your beat (at 80 beats a minute, 75 ms either way), and never tighter than 30 ms, or 45 ms on a Bluetooth keyboard, whose timing wobbles more. Outside that it is early or late; up to twice that earns half credit. One late note doesn't make the next one early: if you hesitate and carry on, only the hesitation counts.
Chords
Notes of a chord count as played together when each follows the one before within about 60 ms (a little more on a Bluetooth keyboard), so a rolled or slightly spread chord is one chord, on time if its first note is.
Keep going
The first rule of sight-reading is to keep going. Each stop (a gap at least twice what the music asks and over a second longer than it), each restart and each skip, however many bars it jumps, takes 10 points off. If you go back, we grade the last time you played each bar.
Steadiness
How much your beat changes from bar to bar, and from the start of a stretch of playing to its end. Changes up to 2 % a bar and 5 % overall are free, so a slow, steady speeding up costs a little too.
Wait mode
In Wait, the music waits for you: it holds at the next note or chord until you play it, with no clock. Play a chord's notes together, or hold each one down until the last arrives. Wrong keys don't move you on; we count each as half a wrong note. Holding more than a beat longer than the music asks counts as a stop, and after 4 seconds at one place you can ask for the note names, which we count too.
Rhythm only
When you practise the rhythm alone, any key will do: only when you play counts. It's graded like a normal take: Rhythm, Keep going and Steadiness, as above. Keys pressed together count as one chord.
Lengths and pedal
Only when the music asks for them, and they count for little: a note should sound for at least 60 % of its written length (the pedal counts), and marked pedal should be down for most of its span.
Overall
A mix of the marks above, led by Notes and Rhythm, and never higher than your Notes mark: music you skipped or played wrong can't hide behind good timing.
Your setup
The tap-along calibration measures your keyboard's delay and how much it wobbles. The delay is taken off every note, and a wobbly setup gets wider windows, so your keyboard never costs you marks.
What we can't check
Fingering, hand position, posture, tone and the balance between your hands can't be read from a keyboard's signal, so we don't grade them. Loudness depends on each keyboard, so it is only ever compared with your own playing.

How your profile works

One profile
Everything you play, in drills, fresh sight-reading and your pieces, feeds one picture of what you read: every line and space in each clef, key signatures, sharps and flats, intervals and chords, rhythms and playing with both hands. For each one we keep how often you get it right, how fast you find it, and how well you remember it after time away.
Speed is the score
Something counts as learned when you play it right three times and fast enough: under a second for a single note, a little longer for a key signature, an interval or a chord. The goal is to know it without thinking, which frees your eyes to read ahead. Rhythms and hand coordination have no clock: playing them on time is the test.
One new thing at a time
You learn in the order a teacher would use, starting from middle C. You drill what you have learned plus one new thing; when it is learned, the next one opens. Rhythms and hand coordination have their own next step, so they move along with your reading.
Coming back at the right time
Something you just learned comes back tomorrow, then in a few days, then in a week or more, each time you remember it. Get it wrong and it comes back in a few minutes, then starts its spacing again. Many right answers in one sitting count about as much as one: what matters is remembering after a break.
Your pieces count too
A note that goes wrong in a piece turns up in your next warm-up, and we tell you where it was. When you play a piece again, mistakes still count in full, but right notes count for less, because fingers that know a piece can play it without reading.
Your reading level
Only the first time you play music you have never seen moves your reading level. That is the honest test of reading, so the fresh pieces we write for you are the ones that count. Your level is where your first plays come out at about 85; a clean first play moves it up, a hard one moves it down.
Ready, a stretch, not yet
A piece is ready when about nine tenths of its notes use things you already read without thinking, and a stretch from three quarters. We list what's new in it and drill those first.
The placement check
On your first visit, a 3-minute check finds where you are, so if you already read a little you don't start at middle C. What it skips over is treated as known until you show otherwise.
Learning a piece
A piece you are learning goes in steps, the way a teacher would set them: the right hand alone, then the left, then both hands, all in Wait, where the music waits for you; then with the metronome at 60 %, 80 % and finally all of the marked tempo. A step in Wait passes when 90 % of the notes are right and you didn't need the note names. A step with the metronome passes on a take that scores 85 overall and 90 for notes, with at most one stop, restart or skip, at nine tenths of the step's tempo or faster.
Loops
When the same bar is among your worst on two takes in a row, we offer to loop it. A loop starts a little slower than your step and gets faster by 5 % of the marked tempo each time you play it cleanly, up to the step's tempo; a clean time through at that tempo finishes it.
Your repertoire
Each piece you have learned keeps a fluency mark: how well your plays with both hands and the metronome went lately, less for playing slower than marked, fading the longer you leave it. A piece you once played well that fades below 70 comes back as one to play again. Playing it after a few days away keeps it longer than many plays in one day.

What you need

A MIDI keyboard (most digital pianos and keyboards have a USB port) and Chrome or Edge on a computer or an Android tablet, or Firefox on a computer. Safari, iPhone and iPad can't connect a keyboard to a web page. Without a keyboard, the note drills and the placement check work on an on-screen keyboard.

Your data

Your reading profile, practice, takes and scores live in your browser, on this device. Nothing about your playing is sent to us. Settings can save a copy to move to another browser. To count how many people use Clefsight, the browser sends a random number, at most once a day, when a keyboard connects.