While I was playing with FingerPiano to review it my girlfriend asked, “Is that a new piano music app?” and grabbed my iPhone out of my hand and finished my song. I then showed her the song list and she chose the “The Entertainer” and proceeded to play it all the way through. She was positively giddy and when she finished said, “I’ve never played the piano before. That was so fun. I want this app on my iPhone.” And she loaded up the app store on her iPhone and purchased it right away. This has only happened a few times before and I’ve downloaded hundreds of apps.

FingerPiano is a great little app that allows you to play classic famous pieces of music using just one finger at a time. This app uses scrolling guides above the keys to show you what note to play and how long to play each note. It’s a brilliant idea that is simple to grasp and pickup. FingerPiano comes with 88 pieces of famous music including: Fur Elise, Canon in D, Amazing Grace, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, Arabesque and many more great pieces. If you aren’t familiar with the songs you can have a listen by pressing play. You may also jam along with the song if you’d like. This is a really neat feature as I wasn’t familiar with a few of the included songs. The only real problem I have is that the playback sound a bit stacatto, quantisized, or robotic. If a swing slide feature was include that would be neat… or another way to “humanize” the playback of the songs

The piano sound is ok and sounds a bit like a toy piano which is ok for this app… it doesn’t really bother me. If you are looking for an iPhone piano with the best sound I’d recommend Grand Pro.

Here’s a YouTube FingerPiano tutorial:

Verdict
Pros: Makes learning classic pieces of music possible for any skill level. Comes with 88 famous pieces of music. Simple to use.

Cons: Playback of included song library songs sounds a bit too quantized and robotic. A swing or “humanize” feature would be a welcome feature.

Features I Would Like To See: The ability to play chords and have them represented by different color guides than the melody notes… maybe use red for chords and blue for the melody. I bet this would be tough to do because obviously we aren’t dealing with much screen real estate. Maybe us a stackable keyboard setup. Also, a built in reverb with adjustable level mix is always a nice effect to have on piano samplers/synths. Slide finger to roll keys.

Sound: 6/10
Originality: 9/10
Ease of Use: 10/10

:: App Store Page :: $2.99
:: Web ::