Music · Piano

Punjabi songs on the piano

Something you can do tonight: two beginner arrangements — five white keys, one hand position, playable in a sitting by someone who has never touched a piano. Free sheet music, released CC BY-SA, because a music teacher in Vancouver or Birmingham should be able to print it for a class tomorrow.

Try it here

The keyboard

Honesty first, as always: these songs are oral chants with no canonical melodies — they are sung differently in every family. Our arrangements are educational adaptations created for Punjabia, not transcriptions of any recording. They are doorways, not definitions. The keyboard below is synthesised in your browser: no recordings, no downloads, nothing plays until you ask it to.

The play buttons walk through Sunder Mundriye line by line — keys light up in marigold with finger numbers as the melody goes. Slow it down, loop a line, or just click keys freely. It works with a mouse, a finger, or the letter keys A–K.

The lessons

Two arrangements, free forever

★☆☆☆☆ · ♩= 88–96 · five-finger C position

Sunder Mundriye

The Lohri song. The hand never moves, lines 1 and 3 are nearly identical, and every line ends on a note long enough to shout “ho!” over.

Full lesson →

★★☆☆☆ · ♩= 120–138 · five-finger C position

Kikli Kaleer Di

The spinning-game rhyme, faster. Lines 1 and 2 are the same shape moved down a step — the most useful thing a beginner can ever notice.

Full lesson →

The sheet music

Both are Punjabia's own work, released CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to copy, print, teach, arrange, and adapt, with attribution. The songs themselves are traditional and belong to everyone already.

Why a drone, not chords

Every arrangement here puts an open fifth — C and G held together — under the melody, instead of a chord progression. That is not a simplification; it is the truth of the idiom. Punjabi folk melody sits over a drone — the held tone of the tumbi's open string, the algoza's second pipe — not over Western harmony. Teach the drone, and you have taught something true about the music, not just something easy about the piano. And Kokla Chhapaki is deliberately not here: it is a chant, not a tune, so its page teaches rhythm and clapping instead — which is its own honest lesson.