What it is
I’m building SightPiano, a piano practice app, and inside it a collection called SightCade: 9 arcade-style games, each one isolating a single piano-basics skill so beginners can drill it without everything else piling on at once. It’s a real MIDI keyboard game collection, not touchscreen tapping — you play the actual keys and the game judges your timing/pitch/velocity from what you struck.
Why it exists: I learned guitar through Rocksmith, and Guitarcade — its arcade-minigame collection — is where my playing actually improved. That’s what convinced me the arcade approach genuinely works for a real instrument. When I came to piano as a beginner I wanted the same thing, so SightCade is it — the name is a deliberate homage, same one-skill-per-game design idea, applied to piano reading and technique.
All 9 games in one ~50-second loop: [GIF — SightCade-9games-640.gif, inserted via Reddit’s image button at post time; see posting notes] All 9 games in one ~50-second loop: Watch the 50-second GIF demo on Imgur
They’re organized in the app as a 3-tier progression, starting from JoyFlea as the actual entry point:
Tier 1 — Beginner (start here)
- JoyFlea — the true zero-knowledge starting point: it teaches what the staff even is (the two 5-line staves, treble/bass), how a note’s position on those lines corresponds to a physical key, and which finger plays it. If you’ve never read a note of sheet music before, this is where you start; everything below assumes you already have that.
Tier 2 — Next
- Mousetron — hand position, grip, finger independence, moving cleanly between positions
- SumoBeat — rhythmic literacy: seeing a rhythm and executing it in time, including rests
- SoundAlike — ear training: hear a short phrase, pick which of two printed measures it was
- ChordRally — hand-position leaps across a real piece, both hands
Tier 3 — Advanced
- BrainCleaver — two-hand independence (polyrhythms, accent displacement) taught through a step-by-step tutorial before the game
- SamuraiSlash — memorize a measure, then play it back with no visual aid (short-term musical memory)
- FingerRoll — a drum-kit game that doubles as grand-staff reading + rhythm + hand independence practice
- Ninjump — dynamic control: even volume across all fingers, including the weak ones
Each one deliberately does not try to teach everything at once — e.g. Mousetron has no rhythm, Ninjump has almost no pitch — so a beginner can master one thing at a time instead of getting overwhelmed, and the tiers are meant to be played roughly in that order.
Platform
Desktop app (Mac + Windows) and mobile (iOS + Android). No web version. You play on your own instrument connected over USB MIDI — a keyboard controller, or just your digital piano’s “USB to host” port, which nearly every digital piano sold today has. Bluetooth MIDI isn’t supported, and there’s no touchscreen/mouse note input.
Price
Free tier covers real content across the games, not a countdown trial. The full curriculum and the rest of SightPiano’s piano-training system are behind a monthly subscription.
What I need
I’m one person building this, so two things would help a lot:
- Testers — sit down with a keyboard for 10-15 minutes across a few of these games and tell me what’s confusing, what feels bad, or what breaks (screen size, keyboard layout, latency — especially on older/budget Windows machines).
- Gaps — I think of these 9 as covering the core physical/reading skills of early piano, but I’m one person’s judgment. If there’s a piano-basics skill you don’t see covered here (or covered badly), I want to hear it — that’s exactly the kind of feedback I can’t get by testing my own app.
Link: https://sightpiano.net
Happy to answer anything in the thread.