Flowkey is a subscription-based service. You can pay either monthly (20e/month), yearly (10e/month), or have a lifetime subscription (330e). The review is written in June 2021 and the prices are what they were at the time of writing.
I recently started practicing the piano and decided to try Flowkey. Here is my review of the service.
Very very short summary: 1 star out of 5. Promises way more than it delivers and completely fails to utilize the potential it has. Do not buy.
My Background
I am an adult and I have never played piano before. I play the accordion and sing actively, but am not great in either by any standards. I know music theory and playing accordion has taught me a good bit of hand isolation. I have also had access to a piano most of my life and I use it constantly when I practice singing, so I am familiar with how they work. So I'm not the most usual student, but I'd guess that there's plenty like me that would like to learn piano as a second or third instrument.
The Service
Flowkey is a service that helps you "Learn piano with the songs you love". They advertise the service to be "For beginners, returners, and advanced players". The service has two parts: the songs and the courses. There are 8 courses in three categories: Beginner Courses (3), Exercises & Scales (3), Chords & Improvisation (2). Their website tells there are over 1500 songs in their archive and several of them are available in multiple skill levels. When you use Flowkey, you connect to the service either via a microphone or MIDI. I did have an electric piano, so I used the MIDI option, which worked without any issues. I do not speak of the customer service in the review, since I had no reason to contact them.
Flowkey is a subscription-based service. You can pay either monthly (20e/month), yearly (10e/month), or have a lifetime subscription (330e). The review is written in June 2021 and the prices are what they were at the time of writing. When you unsubscribe, you can keep using the service until your paid period runs out.
The Courses
There are eight courses available at the moment. They consist of several lessons, which consist of video instructions, exercises, and songs. When learning a song or doing an exercise during a course Flowkey has both a video of a pianist playing the melody (hands & keyboard from straight up) and automatically scrolling sheet music visible for the student. The MIDI/microphone connection listens to the playing and waits until you have pressed the correct key before the exercise moves on. The songs are chopped into several small, usually something like two to four bars. First, the part is demonstrated to the student, after which the student has (usually) three repetitions to learn the right hand. After this, there are three repetitions to learn the left hand and finally three repetitions to combine. Then the exercise moves to the next part.
The video instructions are extremely short. The longest video is around 40 seconds, and most of them are less than 20 seconds. The material in the videos was not available in written form. The short videos make for an uncomfortable user experience since moving forward requires you to constantly click something with a mouse on a computer that is on top of a piano. It also makes the experience restless and begs the question: could you have put a bit more in a single video? I do appreciate that the videos are on the point, but eleven seconds to describe how to hold your fingers while playing gives the impression that finger positioning is not a big deal. The total combined runtime of all the video instructions in all the courses is around thirty minutes, so don't expect very much or detailed information from Flowkey.
The songs and exercises are technically very lacking. It is very unclear if you are supposed to be practicing right hand, left hand or both, since there is no mention of this anywhere, and the fingering video is the same for all of these. You are just assumed to know or remember. After completing the part of the exercise, it does say something like "good work for completing the right hand", so there is a strong assumption that you do follow the learning pattern.
The fingerings are usually not given, so I was often left wondering if it is encouraged to use the fingerings that come most naturally or to follow the ones in the video demonstration. The sheet music is also not available in a single page format, it always just flows on the screen as you play. For a person who is used to looking a bit ahead, this is frustrating.
Most importantly, Flowkey makes no effort to evaluate your skill or progress in any way. The exercise parts are repeated a predetermined number of times and then the exercise moves on. It is left solely to the student to judge when their skill is good enough to move forward. Flowkey judges that the exercise is "done" when you have pressed the right keys in the right order. It does not care how many mistakes you made, it does not track your volume and it doesn't even care about beat or tempo. This is extremely forgiving, to the point where you can do all the exercises without actually being able to play anything. One of the most important roles of a teacher is to tell you how many repetitions you should do and when you should move on.
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During my one-month subscription, I did six out of the 8 courses. For an adult with an accordion background, all that I did were extremely easy. I have more detailed course descriptions below, but here are some comments on the courses from my perspective.
The courses focused very frustratingly on teaching me music theory. And at a very slow pace for an adult at that. To have individual lessons for whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, and eighth notes, and then another set of lessons for equivalent rests feels needlessly stretched out. I guess the point is that you keep playing while you learn and that way you have something "new" to learn all the time while your body internalizes the lessons. But I still disagree that this would be a sensible way to teach anybody with a regular adult's attention span. More than that, I would assume that any teaching professional could distinguish between theory and practice, and realize that these are two separate skills. I wanted to learn to play piano and ended up listening to what is 3/4 time.
Finger crossing techniques came in the first "intermediate" course, so apparently, Flowkey classifies playing C major scale as an intermediate skill. And it doesn't get much more advanced than that. Overall it just feels they don't have enough material to justify a monthly subscription payment, so they spread it out into way too many lectures and exercises. In the sheet music reading course there are actually several exercises, where you are taught C, D, E, F, and G. Each exercise consists demonstration of how to play that said note four times, followed by the student playing the note four times, repeated thrice. Pressing single key.
In addition and in weird contrast to that, the chords course had somewhat extreme pacing that assumed that when somebody has told you what an inversion is, you can play them fluently. The course jumped over exercises that would help you to automatically hit the right chords and went straight to playing rather long lists of random inversions. And while I did appreciate the only semblance of a challenge the courses provided, it was all watered down with extremely slow tempo, which of course you could not increase yourself.
The scale courses introduced one scale after another. Great, useful, important. But I ran out of patience to have an individual lesson teaching me scale after another. Again not enough material, so it's spread out too thin.
The Songs
There is a respectable collection of songs available, and many have different versions for different skill levels. The learning system works so that you can learn the right hand, the left hand, or both, and can have Flowkey either play the song and muddle on yourself or have Flowkey follow you so that it doesn't progress until you have hit the right keys. This is apparently the primary product, considering how lacking the courses are. Unfortunately, I found the song service also almost useless.
There is no downloadable sheet music. The only way for you to play without having a computer (or a tablet) on top of your piano is to write down the sheet music yourself. There also is no "teaching plan" for the songs. No recommendations on what are tricky parts and how to practice them. There isn't even such breakdown to parts as with the courses. It's just a song with demonstration and rolling sheet music with options to follow your playing or play 75% or 50% speed. Notice that even here there is no option that would include playing in tempo. If you choose the slowed-down option, then the music just plays no matter how many mistakes you make. Naturally, it does not tell you if you did well.
The whole thing boils down to a collection of music with demonstrations. It's a good collection with lots of different styles and skill levels, but it definitely is not worth paying a monthly fee, since if you are willing to pay, there are way better sources of curated learning material.
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All in all, there just is not nearly enough material to justify a monthly subscription of twenty euros. Based on the pricing scheme, I think the creators know this. They sell year- and lifetime subscriptions much cheaper, because they know it is unlikely that people will keep using the service. There is a lot of potential in teacherless learning services, but Flowkey falls short in almost every category. There is not enough material. What there is, is poorly organized. There is zero gamification. There is no pedagogic plan. I had the feeling that the whole thing is not constructed by music teaching professionals, but just people who have thrown a bunch of exercises to the internet that their teacher had told them to do.
Flowkey, despite its claims, also has a very narrow target audience: complete beginners who have no experience in music. For anyone with any experience, the content would be better provided with proper sheet music and a demonstration. The courses cover only the very basics and never go into things like style or swing, they don't even mention the pedals at all. They are also tedious to follow if you know even the basics of how music is written.
Things I'd expect from a service like this:
Evaluation & Feedback. The service should give a tempo and see how well I can keep to it. And make it faster if I'm doing well, and slower if I'm doing poorly. It should count how many mistakes I make and make me redo the exercise if there are too many. It should listen to how loud I play and give feedback. It should check that the chord keys are depressed simultaneously. And when I do a mistake, tell me what the mistake was. I was stuck for quite a while once when I didn't realize I played the melody from the wrong octave. The darn thing just told me to press the correct keys. Automatically generated exercise routine. This week you should do these scales this many times at this tempo and practice these isolation drills and select one of these three songs. Or something in that style. Sight-reading exercises. Chord progressions. That sort of stuff. Now when you're done with the course, you're done. And probably can't yet play the piano. Clearer instructions. If I'm supposed to practice right hand only, why don't you write "right hand only" somewhere on the screen? Why not have a separate video that would demonstrate only the right hand? Tell me if I should follow the demonstrated fingerings and if so, write them to the sheet music. How much should I look (or avoid looking) at the keyboard while playing? I get it, you're trying to be compact, but that compactness comes with a heavy price here.
As it currently is, Flowkey has no purpose. It doesn't really do anything better than a good book would. I see no justification for the rather steep monthly price and hence would recommend that spending your hard-earned money elsewhere. I would be interested in hearing if anybody has found Flowkey to be an excellent resource. What do you like about it and what parts from above you disagree with.
Piano Guidance
Photo: Cristyan Bohn
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