Electronic Piano emulates one of those electronic musical keyboards on your computer, using each keystroke of your PC keyboard to produce a different sound. Just like the original instrument, this software app supports a wide range of different sound styles, enabling you to emulate almost anything from a piano to a guitar, including trumpet, bass, organ, harmonica, violin, cello and a lot more.

Of course, you'll also get the special effects section (typewriter, helicopter, applause, gun shot and so on) and finally the drums, with even a wider selection of sounds.

The program is really easy to use, as it displays the note chart on its interface so that you know what you're playing at all times. On the downside, the keyboard seems to have a slower response than expected, which makes the whole experience a bit disappointing. Also, I notice one note was out of tune, which is certainly not something I would expect from a music program, even if it's not a professional tool.

Electronic Piano is a simple, MIDI digital keyboard that lets you play some basic tunes on your PC. That said, don't expect professional output. This is just for fun.

Download Electronic Piano 2.5 in Softonic

Finding suitable software to help learn to play a musical instrument can sometimes prove to be more difficult than just sitting down and teaching yourself. A disproportionate number of programs scrape the surface and don’t provide the flexibility, depth or support that you'll need. Fortunately, Guitar Pro provides a complete tool that will take you from tuning the guitar, through learning the scales and even composing your own sheet music.

Interface

Guitar Pro's main interface might initially seem like a daunting array of buttons on both the top and bottom of the window. On further inspection it becomes clear that the majority of button on Guitar Pro's interface are involved with composing and each one refers to a very specific element. There are actually very few that you need to be familiar with to get going.

Features

The digital guitar tuner and the metronome feature provided with Guitar Pro are extremely handy to have, and save you the bother of going out to buy them. Once prepared, you can get started on the individual note library that lets you visualize the fingering as well as listen to how they should sound. Moving on, you can practice the large variety of scales that each come with a plethora of variations.

Music Composition

When it comes to composing or playing sheet music, Guitar Pro's virtual keyboard can be a little tedious, but will yield results when you want to compose something of your own. For optimum results with Guitar Pro you can hook up your own MIDI device like a keyboard and get working on tracks that are as simple or complex as you want. Guitar Pro's extra dimension of a separate MIDI device lets you get ideas down much quicker while also giving you the ability to experiment with variations of a piece.

Guitar Pro unfortunately does have quite a cluttered interface. A facelift certainly wouldn't hurt, with tabs or something similar that would better categorize and clean up the buttons scattered around the screen. The help file covers each topic without going into excruciating detail.

Guitar Pro is a good one-stop solution for beginners and experts alike to learning to play and compose music for the guitar.

Download Guitar Pro 6 in Softonic

Naming anecdotes aside, the game is described as a fun method to learn to play the piano but honestly, I have to disagree on that. Synthesia is by no means an easy method to learn the piano: I have some very basic piano notions myself and I found it extremely difficult. It could be because I was using a standard computer keyboard to test the game, and not a real music keyboard as recommended by the developer.

On the upside, I especially liked the default song selection the program includes to get you started (they're all popular theme songs from very well-known videogames). Also, note that you can use just about any MID file with Synthesia, which turns it into pretty much a never-ending musical entertainment.

With Synthesia you can practice your piano skills on the computer, but forget about learning how to play it: you'll need some prior basic knowledge.

Download Synthesia 0.8.1 in Softonic

When you open MidiPiano, you'll see a 'virtual keyboard' with a Piano Roll window that will show you what you record, and let you edit it too. This isn't a complete recording app or anything like it, but for beginners looking for a cheap way to play with a piano keyboard, MidiPiano it's pretty good.

The main problem with MidiPiano is that editing the keyboard layout isn't easy, and the midi editor isn't as user friendly as it could be. The midi sequencer, Piano Roll, should be much easier to edit - deleting wrong notes is simple, but adding new ones is less so!

If you want to turn your keyboard into a simple, synthesized Piano, MidiPiano does the job. With some practice it's not too hard to play, and is a good basic introduction to the world of music making apps.

Download MidiPiano 2.1.6.5 in Softonic

The principle is very simple. You've got six strings and to pluck each one you just click the mouse on them. There are three main settings - acoustic, electric and synthesized guitar. Just keep clicking the string until the tone on the program sounds exactly like the tone on your guitar. The disadvantage however is that, if you're tone deaf like me, it's hard to ascertain when you've got it right. If only the program could "hear" the guitar through the microphone, and show you how close it was to being in tune like a normal tuner, it would score much more highly.

Nevertheless, for a simple and elegant looking tuner, you need look no further.

Download Free Guitar Tuner 1.50 in Softonic

Finale is strictly a tool for professionals, and beginners to music composition will quickly find themselves overwhelmed. It has however been made easier to use in recent releases and Finale 2011 is probably the most user friendly version yet. There are also several major improvements in the latest version including Improved Lyric Entry and Spacing, Instant Capo Chords and Expanded Percussion Playback.

Certainly Finale is still probably one of the most powerful cross platform tools for turning ideas into music. There are literally hundreds of features in Finale's rather crowded interface which make it very intimidating at first. However, Finale 2011 has made things much quicker and more intuitive meaning you can get more music written in half the time. Many of the old keyboard shortcuts have also been replaced by one click actions meaning you don't have to remember all those "Alt" key functions.

Finale 2011 is the best version of Finale yet although beginners should be prepared for a very steep but worthwhile learning curve.

Download Finale 2011 c in Softonic

TuxGuitar looks really complex at first sight – at least for music newbies – so we have the feeling it may overwhelm novice users. But the amount of tools available, along with an extensive help section and documentation really encourages you to give it a go.

TuxGuitar features a nicely-designed interface with clear, simple lines that makes music composition tasks into lighter work. Besides composing on the tablature, you can also use a virtual guitar fretboard or piano keyboard to make composition even easier. What's more, TuxGuitar lets you play the songs you compose, using one of the many instruments included in it.

In spite of a confusing first impression, TuxGuitar well deserves a chance from all music composers: it's nicely designed and features many interesting tools.

Download TuxGuitar 1.2 in Softonic

Whether you play directly into Encore or transcribe your MIDI files, you get accurate notation and beautiful printouts every time. You can extract parts, transpose for different instruments, and play your music as you originally conceived it. Encore graphically displays and plays back dynamic marks, repeats, multiple endings, pedal marks, or any MIDI controller.

Encore scores can be fine-tuned with a simple move of the mouse. On-screen palettes let you enter appropriate notes or graphics and both lyrics and text are easily added. As a guitar enthusiast, I was interested by the option to instantly transcribe music into guitar tablature with correct fingering and guitar fret diagrams although in the end, I couldn't quite work it out.

For professional musicians writing compositions, this is a brilliant tool but you'll need some time to get used to it.

Download Encore 5.0.6 in Softonic

Leaving aside the salmon-pink background, which is a little difficult to cope with, the way it works is that after pressing the Start button, you have to choose which type of chord you are looking for: Major & Minor, Augmented, Diminished Suspended, of 6th, of 7th and so on. At this point just click on the name of the note you want and view all the available combinations for creating that chord on the central window.

View the ‘How to read the chords’ sections if you have any problems understanding what ‘X 0 2 2 2 0’ means. This represents which cords you have to play, and where you have to put your fingers. That said, I’ve found it strange that the most common way to play chords is not the first solution available, but instead appears in the middle of a nearly endless list. I don’t really understand the logic behind this, although I hope there is one. If you want, you can also export the list of combinations as a text document by clicking on the Printable Format button.

Guitar Chords is a useful database of all the possible chords you can create with your guitar. It also features all the possible combination of notes you can use to create that chord, although, as the list is very long, it can be confusing to find the most common way to play a specific sound.

Download Guitar Chords 2.1 in Softonic

Guitar Rig allows you to connect your guitar to your computer so that you can amplify and manage your guitar sound as if you were in a professional studio . The soundcard routes the signal to your speakers and Guitar Rig simulates a series of classic amps, cabinets, mics and effects via a drag and drop interface.

Of course, the effect is not as good as using a professional studio but most users report that reproduction is very good for a simple computer application. The interface of Guitar Rig is extremely well laid out and even for those new to amps and guitar effects, it doesn't take long to navigate your way around. If you intend to use Guitar Rig for live performances, a convenient Live View displays the most essential readouts and level monitors to keep your eye on.

It's not exactly a professional music studio but Guitar Rig is an impressive effort.

Download Guitar Rig 4.0.8 in Softonic

You can configure the program to play chords by pressing a certain key, applied automatically when you create a new file, and there are a wide range of different tracks and effects you can apply to your compositions. With support for 15 channels and real-time mixing, this really is a pretty powerful program. You will need DirectX 8 to experience the full capabilities and be warned, we did experience a few bugs and crashes when we tested it.

Download KB Piano 2.2.4 in Softonic

Chord Pickout is useful for guitar and piano players who need the chords to popular songs without having to transcribe them manually. This includes Guitar fingerings for guitarists for even easier playback. Of course, the results are never perfect which is why Chord Pickout allows you to modify and edit the chords to make them more accurate.

To use Chord Pickout, just download a song or audio file and save it to an MP3, WMA, OGG, AAC, M4A, WAV & CD file. Load it into Chord Pickout and the program does the rest. Chord Pickout transcribes the music and produces a printable and editable score to play from.

The most annoying thing about Chord Pickout however is that the demo only transcribes the first 20 seconds of a song. This is far too short to judge its performance before deciding whether to pay for the full version.

Chord Pickout doesn't produce perfect results nor is the demo long enough but for pitch deaf musicians, it's an excellent playing aid.

Download Chord Pickout 1.4 in Softonic