Tiny Instrument · Play
The staff, engraved like real sheet music.
The grand staff was rebuilt from the ground up to read the way printed music does — correct stems, properly stacked chords, real accidentals and key signatures, and chord and roman-numeral labels above every bar. What you play now looks like what you'd find on the page.
Get Tiny Instrument ↗Engraved correctly
Notes are engraved by the same rules a publisher uses. Stems point up or down depending on where the note sits and flip above the middle line, a chord shares one stem instead of sprouting several, and close intervals offset across the stem so they never overlap into a smudge. The rules apply everywhere the staff appears — Play, lessons, games, and ear-training — so the notation is consistent across the whole app.
Stem direction
Stems follow the notes and flip above the middle line, the way real engraving does.
Shared chord stems
A chord stacks on one stem instead of a cluster of separate stems.
Offset seconds
Notes a second apart step across the stem so they stay readable.
Accidentals and key signatures
Sharps and flats now draw on the staff in standard notation, and you choose how. Explicit puts a ♯ or ♭ beside every altered note. Key signature draws the signature at the clef and only marks notes that step outside the key — with a ♮ to cancel — just like printed music. Or turn staff accidentals off and let the note name carry it. Double-sharps (𝄪) and double-flats (𝄫) render too.
Explicit
A sharp or flat beside every altered note.
Key signature
Drawn at the clef, with only out-of-key notes marked.
Off
The staff stays clean and the note name carries the accidental.
Chord names and roman numerals
In Play, each chord is captioned above the staff with its chord symbol and, when a key is set, its roman numeral underneath — in both Progression and Chord modes. Set an inversion and the symbol reads as a slash chord (C/E) that matches the notes on the staff. The roman numerals are bold serif and coloured by chord quality, so major, minor, and diminished read at a glance.
Chord symbols
Every bar labelled with its chord, slash-bass and all.
Roman numerals
The harmony's function in your key, quality-coloured to match the chord grid.
Independent toggles
Show chord names and roman numerals together or on their own, in Settings → Staff & Notation.
Roman numerals, your way
Choose how numerals are spelled in minor keys. Scale-specific keeps them clean — A minor reads i ii° III iv v VI VII with no extra accidentals. Always-major measures every chord against the parallel major, so the same progression reads i ii° ♭III iv v ♭VI ♭VII. Major keys read identically either way. It applies to the staff labels, the diatonic play strip, Compose progression chips, and the circle of fifths.
Play along on the staff
In Progression mode the staff shows the whole loaded progression as gray ghost bars — one chord per measure, voiced with each chord's inversion. Each bar fills solid green as you play its notes, and the bar under the cursor lights up during Play-all so the green sweeps across the staff. Tap any ghost note — head or stem — to hear it, with the sparkle landing right on the notehead.
Play a progression you built →Sharper symbols, from a real music font
Every notation symbol — clefs, rests, dynamics, ornaments, segno and coda, fermatas, pedal and glissando marks — now renders from a proper music font (Noto Music) instead of falling back to look-alike text. On the page that means crisp, correct glyphs at every size, on every platform, rather than boxes and near-misses.
Make the staff yours
A dedicated Settings → Staff & Notation section gathers every staff control in one place: show the staff, pick the view, show note names and where they sit (beside, above, or inside the notehead), draw ledger lines, and set the chord-label and roman-numeral options. Separately, an octave-numbering setting lets you label middle C as C4 (scientific) or C3 (Yamaha / Logic / Cubase) — a display choice that never changes the pitch you hear.
Save the staff to a composition →Ready to try it?
Free to download on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.