The piano piece was too hard, so I built a Skill to simplify it

Lately I’ve been tidying up three open-source Agent Skills I built, and I plan to share them one by one.

I’ll start with the piano score simplifier.

Here’s a problem I run into when playing: I hear a piece I really love and find the original score, only to realize it’s a bit too hard to play straight away, so there’s no low-effort way to enjoy the beautiful melody. And sometimes the urge to play only lasts a moment. There may be simplified versions online, but they don’t always match my level. Sometimes they’re simplified so much that I don’t love the piece as much anymore.

So I’d been wondering: could AI work from the original score and deal only with the parts I can’t play? Say, left-hand chords that are too wide or leaps that are too big—while keeping as much of the rest, the parts I love, as possible.

Eventually I turned that workflow into an Agent Skill called Score Simplifier.

You can pick one of three difficulty levels, L1, L2, or L3, or just tell it where you get stuck, and it will revise those specific measures.

This time I used Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons: “October” as an example. The images show the original score and three simplified versions, so you can compare them side by side and see exactly what it changed.

It’s currently v0.3.7, still experimental. It can output PDF, MusicXML, and MIDI.

It’s free and open source, and the Skill is attached to this post.

If you play piano too, give it a try. I’d especially love feedback from actually playing it: which parts are still too hard, or where the changes don’t quite feel right.

The other two Skills are about job hunting and daily reflection. I’ll introduce them later.