Electronic Piano 2.5 from Maurício Antunes Oliveira is an easy-to-use, freeware application to virtually convert your computer into a keyboard allowing you to play musical notes, chords and drums. You can select among three languages available: English, Spanish and Portuguese. You also can set this option to “Automatic” so the application will set the language according to the operating system language.
The main window is divided into two main sections: Main settings and Chord settings. On top you’ll see the main settings section which displays a virtual keyboard including two and a half octave at a time. You will find a slide bar control to change the octave with five of them available. The major slide bar is a 128 tones bank where you choose the tone you want to play with. You also will find a volume slide bar control, a channel slide bar control with seven steps and a voices slide bar control with seven steps too.
The chord settings section, located below, is very similar to the main settings section, only the keyboard displayed is smaller showing only one octave at a time. Here, you have three modes from which you can select:
• Play one note: so the chord is in fact only one musical note.
• Play chords using three notes, and
• Play chords like a guitar.
In the second mode, play chord using three notes, you can modify the chord configuration using a special designed dialog window.
The interface can be greatly improved, just a tip for future versions. Anyway is a pretty friendly application to get introduced to playing a “virtual” piano and you can use it for free.
You could find very hard to play piano from the computer keyboard and it’s very natural since they weren’t designed to do that. Don’t feel bad if that happens.
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