Standalone app, out now

Every note you play,
on screen.

The Keyboard and wheels 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 one of them. MPE Keys is that one, running on its own, in a window shaped for it instead of for nine.

What it is

A standalone app

Not a plugin and not a browser page. One window with the Keyboard and the PB / Mod display 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.

Eight designs

The same notes,
eight ways to read them.

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 data and every one carries its own colours.

The Classic design: a full ivory and ebony piano with five keys held, a low C octave and an E flat major triad an octave above it, the sounding keys washed in slate blue with amber dots.
Classica real instrument
The Glass design: dark polished keys with a gradient down their length; the five held keys, a C octave and an E flat major triad, glow mint green.
Glasspolished, with depth
The Neon design: keys drawn as thin magenta and cyan outlines on black, with a glowing dot on each of the five held notes.
Neonoutlines only
The Minimal design: flat white and black keys with no shading, where the five held notes show only as a faint wash and a thin bar across the foot of each key.
Minimala bar at the foot of the key
The Dark design: the keyboard nearly black, only the five held keys glowing orange with amber dots.
Darkonly the notes carry light
The Fingerboard design: equal width amber and black stripes instead of key shapes, with a glowing dot on each of the five held notes.
Fingerboardsemitones, equal width
The Motion design: no keys at all, one cyan wave running the full width of the window and rising where the notes are held.
Motiona wave, not a key
The Pixel Grid design: the keyboard as a raster of dim LEDs seen from above, each held note lighting a violet ring of them.
Pixel Gridan LED raster

All eight are the same module and the same moment: one chord, five keys, a C octave under the left hand and an E flat major triad an octave above it, each voice at its own pressure, its own timbre and its own small pitch bend. Photographed one after another so that nothing but the design changes between them. Each is shown with the preset it ships with, and every colour in it can be changed. 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.

The PB / Mod module in Classic style: two tall rounded sliders, the left one showing pitch bend near centre in amber, the right one modulation raised from the bottom in red.
Classictwo sliders
The PB / Mod module in Radial style: two concentric arcs around a centre dot, blue for pitch bend and green for modulation.
Radialone dial

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.

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. On a second display it opens there.
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.
Record and export
Capture a take and write it out as a standard .mid for any DAW, or as a CSV to read the numbers.
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 and PB / Mod
Window
1280 by 560, down to 900 by 360
Controller
Any class-compliant MIDI device

MPE Keys is the smaller of the two apps on purpose. AURA, FORGE, CASCADE, DRIFT, the Grand Staff, the Expression Overview, the Stream Log and the Notation Sheet 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 the licence runs on your machine, not on a rented account.

Licence One machine at a time

MPE Keys

Standalone app for Windows

9,99 €

price incl. VAT

Windows Coming soon

Pay once · No subscription · Updates included

Available for direct download shortly.

Before you go

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MPE Keys is out. The list carries new versions and what is being built next, for this and the other tools.

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