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Practicing against your own sheet music

1 Jul 2026

The built-in library covers common repertoire, but a teacher-assigned piece or a personal favorite that isn't in it is just as easy to practice against — upload a MIDI file or scanned sheet music, and Piano builds a reference the same way it does for library pieces.

MIDI files work directly, since they already encode exact pitch and timing information — this is the most accurate reference type and the one we'd recommend if you have a choice, for instance if your piece came from notation software that can export MIDI alongside a PDF.

Scanned sheet music goes through an optical recognition step that converts standard notation into the same internal reference format MIDI files use. This works well for clearly printed, standard notation; handwritten scores or heavily annotated sheet music can produce a less accurate reference and may need manual correction after upload.

Once uploaded, a custom piece behaves identically to a library piece in every other respect — same pitch and timing scoring, same practice-mode slow-down options, same progress tracking over repeated sessions.

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