Work on the difficult part.
Select a passage, reduce tempo, choose roll or notation, and let wait-for-me timing hold until you find the right notes.
- Passage
- bars 17–24
- Tempo
- 72%
- Timing
- wait for input
0.1.0 development build
Learn songs by watching the notes.
Keyfire Helicon is a free, open-source piano roll for MIDI keyboards. Load MIDI or MusicXML, slow down a passage, wait for each note, and record what you play.
- Platform
- Windows 11 · x64
- Input
- MIDI keyboard
- Files
- .mid · .midi · .musicxml · .mxl · .xml
- Runtime
- C# · .NET 10 · Avalonia
- License
- GPL-3.0-only
- Privacy
- Local-first · no account
01Current system
What works today.
Keyfire is built for self-directed learners and visual performers. It helps you work through a song and inspect a Take; it does not claim to replace a piano teacher.
| Area | Current capability | State |
|---|---|---|
| Learn | Falling notes, synchronized notation, wait-for-me timing, speed control, metronome, A/B loops, and bookmarks. | Working |
| Library | MIDI and MusicXML import, watched folders, search, and a 261-piece starter library of repertoire and exercises. | Working |
| Play | Six-track Free Play recording, instruments, overdubs, quantization, and Standard MIDI File export. | Working |
| Review | Note, timing, and pedal evidence with persistent Take history and independent player profiles. | Experimental |
| Analysis | Deterministic Elevation difficulty analysis and provenance-aware fingering suggestions. | Experimental |
| Visualize | Reactive piano-roll scenes today; capture-oriented visual presets and a video workflow are in development. | In development |
02Basic workflow
Load → isolate → play → review.
Record the performance.
Keep a scored Take in Practice or Perform, or use Free Play to build a six-track arrangement from your keyboard.
- Tracks
- up to 6
- Clock
- native MIDI
- Export
- format-1 MIDI
Make the performance visible.
Use the piano roll, key impacts, hand colors, finger labels, and reactive scenes. Capture and video tooling will build on the same performance data.
- Display
- roll / sheet / both
- Keys
- 88
- Video
- roadmap
03Open project
Research, specifications, and data.
The application is one output of the project. The methods, interoperable file formats, calibration material, and redistributable datasets are intended to remain inspectable and reusable.
RESEARCH / 02 NOTES
Document the hard parts.
Published notes currently cover multidimensional piano difficulty and confidence-gated fingering generation, including limitations and negative results.
SPECIFICATIONS / EVOLVING
Keep music data portable.
The repository documents the open .keyfire.json song sidecar, an embedded Standard MIDI metadata profile, and MIDI-to-MusicXML alignment output.
DATASETS / FREE
Publish reusable evidence.
Keyfire Fingering Commons and the Arpeggio Specialist corpus collect source-audited fingering passages, exercises, manifests, and machine-readable challenge windows.
04Build and status
Run it from source.
The public download is still gated on signing and release verification. The complete application, tests, research tooling, packaging scripts, datasets, and documentation are in the repository now.
- WorkingWindows application and automated tests
- ExperimentalScoring, Elevation, and generated fingering
- PlannedSigned releases, non-Windows backends, and video export
PS> git clone https://github.com/Shedletsky/Keyfire-Helicon.git
PS> cd Keyfire-Helicon
PS> dotnet restore
PS> dotnet run --project src/KeyfireHelicon.App.NET 10 SDK requiredFull build notes →