Standalone app, out now for Windows and macOS

Every note you play,
on screen.

The Keyboard, wheels and Grand Staff of MPE Insight, now an app of their own.

For the camera, the classroom and the desk. A piano that shows what your hands are doing, key by key, from any MIDI keyboard you already own.

Get MPE Keys It already runs inside MPE Insight

Any MIDI keyboard MPE Keys Your screen, your stream, your stage

Pressure Bend ring Hand split Pitch bend Mod wheel

The idea

One window.
Just the keys.

MPE Insight is a workshop: nine modules, a full expression laboratory. Most of the time, though, you want the keys. MPE Keys is the keyboard, the wheels beside it and the staff that writes it down, running on their own, in a window shaped for the three of them instead of for nine.

What it is

A standalone app

Not a plugin and not a browser page. One window with the Keyboard, the PB / Mod display and the Grand Staff in it, and nothing else in the way.

What it shows

Expression, per key

Every sounding note in the colour of its own MPE channel, its pressure as fill, its bend as a ring measured in cents.

Where it comes from

One source, two apps

The same code MPE Insight runs, built a second time with fewer files in it. Every improvement to the keyboard arrives in both.

A smaller app, not a smaller keyboard. Nothing about the Keyboard module itself is cut down for this build.

The film

MPE Keys,
in motion.

The app doing its one job: every note you play, drawn as you play it, with its pressure, its bend and its timbre.

Press play, or watch it on YouTube.

Nine designs

One module,
nine ways to read it.

A piano to look at is not one picture. Some rooms want a real instrument, some want a stripe of light, and a camera wants something else again. Every design draws the same five dimensions and every one carries its own colours. Click a picture to see it full size.

The Classic design in the app window: a full ivory and ebony piano, a red cluster of held keys low down and a blue one an octave above it, each sounding key carrying a coloured dot. — Classica real instrument

The Glass design on a black window: dark polished keys with a gradient down their length, the held notes glowing green, amber, white and violet, one colour to a voice. — Glasspolished, with depth

The Neon design on a magenta window: keys drawn as dark outlines with magenta caps, the held notes burning as red rings on the left and cyan rings on the right. — Neonoutlines only

The Minimal design on a cyan window: flat white and black keys with no shading, a thin cyan bar at the foot of every key, and three white dots where notes are held. — Minimala bar at the foot of the key

The Dark design on a green window: the keyboard nearly black with a green bar at the foot of each key, the held notes showing as magenta and green dots, and one white column of light. — Darkonly the notes carry light

The Fingerboard design on a yellow window: equal width magenta stripes instead of key shapes, with four held notes glowing as cyan, yellow and green discs. — Fingerboardsemitones, equal width

The Motion design on a dark green window: no keys at all, one wave across the full width, red at the left, rising into magenta in the middle and running out blue to the right. — Motiona wave, not a key

The Microtonal design on a grey window: every key split into a front and a back field so a quarter tone sits behind each one, with glowing rings under the held keys and a wide white ring above them. — Microtonala quarter tone behind every key

The Pixel Grid design in its Piano layout on a blue window: the keyboard as a raster of dim LEDs, held keys lit as solid red and yellow columns in the keyboard's own silhouette, with ripple rings spreading around them. — Pixel Grid, Pianothe keyboard's own silhouette

The Pixel Grid design in its Fingerboard layout on a blue window: the same LED raster, four held notes each lighting a yellow column the full height of the panel, with magenta rings rippling out around them. — Pixel Grid, Fingerboardone column per semitone

The Pixel Grid design in its Accordion layout on a blue window: the LED raster as a chromatic button field, three semitones to a column, with magenta and amber rings rippling out across the cells. — Pixel Grid, Accordionthe button field

All eleven are the same module, photographed in the running app, each with the preset it ships with, and every colour in it can be changed. The colour behind the module is not part of the design: that is Transparent BG, the fill a video mixer keys out, and it is yours to pick. Pressure can also fill a key from the bottom like a meter, and a hand split gives the left hand a colour pair of its own.

Per note

Four things happen
on one key.

On an ordinary keyboard display a key is on or off. Under MPE a key has a life: it is held by one voice, it leans, it presses, it brightens. All four are drawn at once, on the key itself.

Pressure

How hard, right now

Channel pressure moves the key's colour between a low and a high tone, or fills it from the bottom up like a meter.

Pitch bend

A ring in cents

A ring around the key shows the actual pitch offset in cents, using the bend range reported by your instrument, rather than an assumed range.

Channel

One voice, one colour

MPE gives every note its own channel. Every lit key carries the colour of the voice holding it, so a chord shows as separate voices.

Timbre

A brightness ring

CC74 rides its own ring, with its own colour pair, size and intensity, so slide and pressure never have to share one signal.

And beside the piano, the two wheels: master pitch bend and modulation from channel 1, as two sliders or as one dial.

Two PB / Mod modules side by side in one window. On the left the Radial style: two concentric arcs around a centre dot, the outer one magenta for pitch bend, the inner one cyan for modulation. On the right the Classic style: two tall rounded sliders, the left one blue and filled to the middle, the right one green and raised from the bottom. — PB / Modone dial, or two sliders

The wheel display is the one reading on the page that never converts. It shows the raw master pitch bend position, so full deflection is full deflection whatever range the instrument reports.

Notation

Play it,
then print it.

Record a take and the same playing comes back out as a page: treble and bass clef, the key signature you picked, chord symbols over the systems and the pitch bend drawn as a curve out of the notehead rather than thrown away. The sheet prints whatever the Grand Staff is showing, which makes three pages out of one recording.

The engraved sheet: five systems of treble and bass clef on black, chord symbols such as B flat major 13 and G minor 9 named in amber above them, cyan noteheads trailing a line for as long as the note is held, and thin curves where the pitch bends. — Timeengraved, with barlines

The Flow sheet: four systems with no staff lines and no barlines at all, every voice a coloured ribbon on white, red, green, blue, orange and violet, each one riding at its own height. — Flowribbons, no barlines

The Tab sheet: seven systems of six string lines on white, a fret number on the string each note is played on, a bar behind it for its length and a waving line where the pitch bends. — Tabsix strings, fret numbers

Three pages, one take. The sheet follows the Grand Staff: leave it on Flow and you get ribbons, leave it on Tab and you get tablature, and every other view engraves as Time. Bar breaks follow the tempo the take was really played to, not an assumed 120, and a recording whose tempo moves gets a grid that moves with it. The same take also leaves the app as a standard .mid and as a CSV.

No controller

It plays, too.

A display that can only watch is useless on a train. Both playable ways in from MPE Insight come along, and both send real MPE out of the app.

Typing Keys

Two manuals under your hands on the computer keyboard, eight white keys each with the sharps on the row above. Those are key positions, not letters, so QWERTY, QWERTZ and AZERTY fall under the same fingers. Space is the sustain pedal.

Mouse Mode

Click or touch a key to send a real MPE note. Each pointer gets its own MPE member channel, so multi touch chords work. Drag sideways for pitch bend, up for pressure, down for timbre.

The two manuals on a computer keyboard: the number row carries the upper manual's black keys 2 3 5 6 7 above the white keys Q W E R T Y U I, the home row carries the lower manual's black keys S D G H J above Z X C V B N M and comma. Below, the same mapping drawn as a piano from C3 to C5, where the lower manual's top key and the upper manual's first key are one shared C4. — Why the black keys land where a pianist expects them: your keyboard's own row stagger is the piano's geometry. Each mapped number sits exactly over the boundary between the two letter keys below it, which is where a black key sits on a piano, and the same holds one row down for S D G H J. The keys that stay grey are the places where a piano has no black key at all. At the default octave the lower manual runs C3 to C4 and the upper one C4 to C5, meeting on the single note they share.

Mouse Mode at work. Every pointer takes an MPE member channel of its own, so several fingers on a touchscreen arrive as separate voices rather than one block. Sideways is pitch bend, up is pressure, down is timbre, and all of it leaves the app as real MPE on the output port.

And a Demo Mode that generates synthetic MPE without any controller at all, for setting a look up before anyone is watching.

Your setup

Plug in and it runs.

Any class-compliant MIDI device, no drivers and no plugins. An MPE controller sends its five dimensions straight away; an ordinary keyboard lights the keys it plays.

Key range: 88, 61, 49 or 25 keys. A smaller range means bigger keys, which is what a small screen and a small controller both want.
Stage view: Shift and F11 clear everything but the picture: no toolbar, no frames, no titles, and the cursor hides after two seconds.
Transparent BG: Drops the panel chrome so only the keys render, with nothing painted behind them.
MIDI in and out: A dedicated output port, so what you play with the mouse or the computer keyboard reaches your synth on the way through.
MIDI files: Play a .mid file through the same path as live input, with full transport.
Grand Staff: The same playing on treble and bass clef, with the key signature you pick and the pitch bend drawn as a curve from each notehead. Five views: the notes you hold right now, a scrolling timeline, expressive ribbons, a harmonic field, or guitar tablature.
Record and export: Capture a take and write it out as a standard .mid for any DAW, as a CSV to read the numbers, or as a printable notation sheet.
Presets and snapshots: Two presets per design as a starting point, then your own looks saved alongside them, and global snapshots for the whole window.
MIDI Learn: Map a hardware knob to a control and keep your hands on the instrument.

Under the hood

System: Windows and macOS
Modules: Keyboard, PB / Mod and Grand Staff
Controller: Any class-compliant MIDI device

MPE Keys is the smaller of the two apps on purpose. AURA, FORGE, CASCADE, DRIFT, the Expression Overview and the Stream Log are not in this build, and not switched off either: the underlying modules are not included at all. If you want those, you want MPE Insight.

Get it

One purchase,
no subscription.

Pay once, download straight away, own it. Updates are included, and there is no subscription behind any of it.

Licence Yours to keep

MPE Keys

Standalone app · Windows & macOS

14,99 €

price incl. VAT

Windows Direct download macOS Mac App Store

Steam Windows · Steam Coming soon

Pay once · No subscription · Updates included

The Windows download comes with a licence key for one machine at a time. On the Mac App Store there is no key at all: the app is tied to your Apple Account.

Before you go

Want it on your screen?

MPE Keys is out for Windows and macOS. The list carries the Steam release and what is being built next, for this and the other tools.

One list for MPE Insight, MPE Drift, MPE Keys and what comes next. No spam, unsubscribe any time.

Every note you play,on screen.

One window.Just the keys.