Sound better
the day you start.

It will. The RK-1 connects three ways: USB cable, classic 5-pin MIDI, or Bluetooth MIDI — open the pairing screen in the dashboard, put your keyboard in pairing mode, and scan.

One honest note: Bluetooth adds roughly 10–20 ms of latency, which some players feel and most don't. If your keyboard also has a USB port, use the cable — it will always be the tightest way to play. Bluetooth is there for the keyboards that have no other option, and for playing across the room.

It's the point. The RK-1 pedals for you — it follows your harmony, lets chords ring, keeps runs clean, and lifts at every chord change like a pianist's foot. Mini keyboards with no pedal jack become full-sounding instruments. If you later buy a pedal, plug it into your keyboard as usual; your foot overrides the automatic pedaling instantly.

Almost nothing to your notes — steady players see roughly 3% touched in our tests, and blue notes and passing tones are left alone. What you get: automatic pedaling on pedal-less rigs, smoother chord voicings, 135 sounds with effects, loop & layer, MIDI export of anything you just played, and an A/B replay that proves exactly what was (and wasn't) corrected. It was built by a player, and it lives on the builder's own board.

The opposite, by design. Assist strength falls automatically as your accuracy rises, the lessons and chord trainer pause correction entirely so grades are honest, and the progress chart shows assistance declining over weeks. The product's goal is to need itself less. You can also switch assist off with a physical button any time.

Charged in full at checkout — $179 plus any tax and shipping, shown before you confirm. Your unit is not delivered until the RK-1 completes its FCC Part 15B declaration; see early access units & FCC status. To cancel, email hello@risekeys.com with your order number any time before your unit ships: full refund to your original payment method, no window, no restocking fee, no reason required.

Play anything, any time — the lessons are optional structure, spanning 12 genres: first songs, folk and holiday classics, blues & boogie, gospel, jazz & swing, Latin rhythms, rock & pop, Chinese and Japanese melodies, classical, scales, chords, and finger drills — with a genre picker right on the panel. Assist, sustain, the sounds, and recording are always live for free play, which is where most of the hours actually go. Singers: key lock plus transpose moves any song into your range without relearning it. And your own MIDI files load as graded lessons — drop a file on the dashboard and "My songs" gets a new falling-note lesson, stars and all.

If you're happy running a laptop, an interface, a DAW session, and a MIDI-effect chain every time you feel like playing — you may genuinely not need this, and we'd rather you keep the $179. The box is for the other version of the evening: two cables, ten seconds, playing. No computer, no session, no screen required, nothing to maintain.

Really. $179 buys the device, all 83 lessons, all 135 sounds, and free software updates for life. We sell a box, not a membership.

If the 3–4 week estimate slips, we email you a real date, and the cancel-for-full-refund option stands until the moment your box is in the courier's hands. If we could not deliver at all, every pre-order would be refunded in full. Pre-orders fund the first production run — we'd rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise.

You pay at checkout — this is a pre-order at the $179 early adopter price. Your RK-1 ships in an estimated 3–4 weeks from your order, with a confirmation email immediately and tracking the day it ships. Change your mind before it ships? Cancel for a full refund, no questions asked.

30 days from delivery, full refund. If the unit is faulty, that's on us — replacement or refund and we pay the shipping. If you simply changed your mind, return it complete and working and you cover the return postage. Full details on the policies page.

The first production run ships to US addresses only — keeping the first batch close keeps quality high and returns simple. International is on the roadmap — email hello@risekeys.com with your country and we'll tell you when it opens.

Straight answer: mini keys are narrower and unweighted, so they won't build the touch of an acoustic action — no box changes that. What they're genuinely fine for: learning where notes are, chord shapes, coordination, rhythm — most of what a first year of piano actually is, and what the 83 lessons drill (with correction off, so scores are yours). The note names and chord shapes transfer when you move to a weighted 88; touch is the part you rebuild. Starting on the keys you own beats not starting.

This, written for them: "The RK-1 sits between the student's keyboard and the sound. In free play it can correct out-of-key notes so early practice sounds musical. During everything graded — all 83 lessons, the chord trainer, every scored drill — correction is fully disabled, so pitch and timing scores are unassisted. There is a physical ASSIST button; off means off. Sessions are logged, including how much assistance was used, so you can see week by week whether the student needs less help. It does not replace a lesson." With assist off it's a metronome, a recorder, a chord trainer, and a progress log — most of what a teacher wants happening between lessons anyway. If the teacher still says no, that's a fine reason to cancel: full refund before ship, 30 days after delivery.

Assist is on for playing, off for learning. Lessons, the chord trainer, and every graded drill run with correction fully disabled — those scores and stars are earned, unassisted. What assist changes is the first weeks, when a beginner's honest output sounds bad enough that most quit. It buys the motivation to keep sitting down, then steps back automatically as accuracy rises — and the progress chart shows the help shrinking, week by week.

There's also a physical ASSIST button; off means off. Families run it off for teacher-assigned practice and on for playing around after. Rough age guide: about 6 and up with an adult doing the one-time setup; the sweet spot is 10+; most early interest comes from adults who quit as kids.

Or walk to the keyboard and look at its back panel. These are the sockets, drawn actual-shape:

The rest of the detail, if you want it:

• A square-ish USB port (printer- cable shape, often labeled USB TO HOST) — compatible. That's essentially every keyboard sold since ~2010.
• Two round 5-pin sockets marked MIDI IN/OUT — compatible directly: run a standard MIDI cable from your keyboard's MIDI OUT into the RK-1's MIDI IN socket. No adapter, no drivers.
• Only headphone + power jacks — that keyboard can't send MIDI and won't work. Email us the model before ordering and we'll confirm either way.
• Two traps on older boards: a USB port labeled DC IN / 5V / TO DEVICE is power-or-storage only, not MIDI (USB TO HOST is the one you want) — and a small round "PC" or "COMPUTER" port on 90s Yamahas/Casios is a serial port with no working modern adapter. If the board also has 5-pin MIDI sockets, use those instead and you're fine.

Buying it as a gift and can't check? Our compatibility promise: if the keyboard turns out not to work with the RK-1, we treat it like a faulty unit — full refund and we pay the return shipping.

Bluetooth MIDI keyboards pair too; Bluetooth adds ~10–20 ms, so the USB cable is always the tightest way to play.

Two things, from anywhere that sells them: a 61-key USB MIDI keyboard with touch-sensitive keys ($45–120 — search exactly those words, any brand), and the RK-1 from this page. Optional third: wired headphones you probably already own. They'll arrive weeks apart — keyboard in days, RK-1 in 3–4 weeks — and that's a fine order of operations: find middle C first, then the box shows up and everything gets better. Unsure about a listing? Paste the link into an email to hello@risekeys.com and we'll say yes or no before you buy.

61-key touch-sensitive USB MIDI keyboard ($45–120) · RK-1 ($179) · wired headphones ($0–25) · adjustable X-stand ($20–35) · adjustable bench ($30–60) · sustain pedal optional — the RK-1 pedals for them until they want a real one. Roughly $240–400 for a genuinely complete setup, once, no subscription on any of it. The stand and bench matter more than people expect: playing at the wrong height is the quiet reason keyboards end up under beds. And if the keyboard you pick turns out incompatible, the RK-1 refund is full and return shipping is on us.

Yes for most of it — melodies, chords, the trainer, free play — because the RK-1 supplies what you have no room for: at Learning level the automatic left hand lays the bass under your one hand. Your OCTAVE buttons work normally, and the box has its own transpose. Where 25 keys runs out: two-handed pieces spanning three octaves will run off the end — playable a hand at a time, but real friction. If two-hand repertoire is the goal, 49+ keys is a better home; if the goal is sitting down and having music come out, 25 is genuinely fine.

That's the setup we expect — the KEYBOARD port is a powered USB-A host port, same job as the port on your laptop, and typical 25–37 key controllers draw from it normally. An unusually power-hungry board can sit behind a $12 powered USB hub instead. Either way the compatibility promise applies: if your controller won't work with the RK-1, full refund and we pay return shipping.

Fair — and if your actual problem is that 25 keys is too small for music you already play, buy the bigger keyboard. But $179 of extra keys buys more silent switches: no sound, no correction, no pedaling, no lessons, no recording. A 61-key controller plugged into nothing sounds exactly as good as a 25-key one. They also aren't rivals: buy the box now, a wider board later, and the box carries straight over — your progress lives on it, not on the keyboard.

Yes — live, and as files. The RK-1 has a 5-pin MIDI OUT carrying the corrected stream, so it does sit between your controller and your rig: run it into a hardware synth, or into any MIDI interface and on into an armed track. What you hear is what leaves. Over the network it appears as a plain MIDI input to Logic, Ableton, FL, Reaper and the rest — no plugin, no driver from us.

And every session is recorded on the box anyway, as a standard .mid of the corrected performance: pull it off the dashboard, drag it onto a track, re-voice it with your own instruments. The take you couldn't play becomes a clip you can quantize and chop.

On raw tone, probably not — a good home piano's sampled grand is something you paid real money for, and our synth voices are our own work sized for a small box. What you're trading for: the RK-1 is the one that fixes wrong notes before you hear them, coaches you, grades lessons, and proves you're improving. A setup that works: your piano's sound for pieces you own, the RK-1 for the ones you're fighting with. It never touches your action — the key feel you like is the key feel you keep.

Not both at once — most home pianos have one USB TO HOST port and the RK-1 needs it while connected. Swapping the cable takes five seconds. Two permanent workarounds, depending on your piano: your piano's 5-pin MIDI OUT can run a standard MIDI cable straight into the RK-1's MIDI IN socket, leaving USB free for the tablet; or if your piano has built-in Bluetooth MIDI, pair the tablet wirelessly and give the cable to the RK-1. Email your model and we'll tell you which applies.

Deliberately. Nearly every keyboard of the last 15 years shipped with a USB-B-to-A cable, so the A port means most people plug in with the cable already in the drawer. It also prevents the classic mistake: if KEYBOARD were USB-C, the box would have two identical C ports and power would end up in the wrong one — different shapes for different jobs. USB-C keyboards connect fine with a standard C-to-A cable (the old phone-charger kind), and Bluetooth MIDI keyboards can skip the cable entirely once the free update lands.

One standard MIDI cable (a few dollars, the same 5-pin DIN cable keyboards have used since 1983): your keyboard's MIDI OUT socket into the RK-1's MIDI IN socket. Notes flow out of the keyboard, in to the box — OUT to IN. That's it: no adapter, no drivers, no USB involved.

The box has its own MIDI OUT as well, carrying the corrected notes. Most people leave it empty, but it is there when you want the fixed stream driving a hardware synth, a sound module, or an interface into your DAW.

Only until you silence it, and it takes one second. Every digital piano and arranger keyboard makes its own sound, so if you leave that on you hear two things: your keyboard playing the note you pressed, and the RK-1 playing the note it corrected. The wrong note comes out anyway and it looks like the box is broken.

The proper fix is Local Control off — nearly every keyboard with built-in sounds has it, under Function, MIDI or Settings. It stops the keys triggering the keyboard's own voices while still sending MIDI. The keyboard becomes a controller; the RK-1 becomes the instrument. Or just turn the keyboard's volume all the way down, which works everywhere.

A silent controller with no speakers needs neither — there is nothing to silence. This is on the first page of the manual.

No, and on purpose. The dashboard sends you the piano roll, the lessons and the visualizer, but the sound stays in the box. Streaming audio over Wi-Fi to a browser adds 100–300 ms of delay, which would undo the whole point of correcting notes in under ten.

Your phone is the screen; the RK-1 is the instrument. To hear it somewhere else, run a cable out of the headphone socket into an amp, powered speakers, a PA or an interface — that stays instant. Audio goes the other way too: plug a phone into AUDIO IN and play along with a track through the box's own speaker.

No. Plug in the keyboard and headphones or speakers, press the button, play — correction, sustain, sounds, and the metronome all work with nothing but the box. The dashboard is optional: lessons with the on-screen keyboard, knobs, charts, and recordings, served by the box to any browser on your own wifi. Nothing to install.

It becomes the network first. If the RK-1 can't find a known Wi-Fi at power-on, it broadcasts its own — "RK-1-Setup" (password on the quick-start card). Join it from your phone, open the setup page it serves, tap your home network from the list, and type your Wi-Fi password once. The box joins, its setup network disappears, and the dashboard appears on your network (the box's screen shows the address, and rk1.local works too). If the password was wrong, the setup network comes right back — you're never stranded. And if you skip all of this forever, everything except the dashboard works with no Wi-Fi at all.

It comes with you. One button exports everything you've ever played — every practice session, saved take, lesson score, custom lesson you imported, setlist, and sound preference — as a single file. Load that file on any other RK-1 and your history is there: your streak, your assist curve, your recordings, your lessons. Useful if a unit is ever replaced, if a teacher hands a box to a student, or if you simply own two. The one thing that doesn't travel is the unit number, which is cryptographically signed to its own box's processor — each RK-1 keeps its own identity. Restoring also sets your current state aside first, so a restore can't be the thing that loses anything.

Your RK-1 keeps working exactly as it did the day it arrived. No account to expire, no server to shut off, no license check, no subscription — the model, sounds, lessons, and your recordings all live on the box and run with the internet unplugged. A dead company would mean no more free updates; it would not mean a dead device, and your recordings are standard MIDI files you can copy off and open anywhere.

Once you're classified solid, correction goes nearly invisible and blue notes and passing tones are left alone — the engine reads the key and chord you're actually in, so a flat third over a dominant chord is inside the music, not against it. You also hold the controls: a correction-strength knob, key lock, and the physical ASSIST switch. Press it off and you have a pure instrument with a metronome, transpose, recording, and nine sounds.

Straight answer: the RK-1 software is proprietary and there's no supported way to load your own firmware. What is open is your side of it — recordings are plain standard MIDI files, the dashboard is ordinary web pages on your own wifi, and the synth voices are original work with no licensed samples and no DRM. No account, no telemetry, no phone-home.

No. Everything — the model, the sounds, the lessons, your recordings — lives on the box. Wifi is only used to show the dashboard on your phone, and only on your own network.

The box classifies you as "solid" within seconds and gets out of the way: near-zero correction, smoother chord voicings, and the full practice toolkit — metronome, drills with timing scores, trouble-key mapping, session recordings.

The RK-1, a USB-C power supply, the keyboard cable your keyboard actually needs, and a quick-start card that says: plug in your keyboard, press the button, play.

You pick the cable at checkout — USB-B, USB-C, micro-USB, or a 5-pin MIDI lead — and we pack that one. Use the compatibility checker above if you're not sure which; it names the cable for you. We'd rather send the right cable than a bag of four, three of which go in a drawer forever. Picked wrong? Tell us and the right one goes out free — nothing to send back.

You don't need anything else. No computer, no interface, no app, no speakers: sound comes out of the box's own speaker, or your headphones.