A freestyle keyboard is the least complicated thing in any piano app, and somehow the one people skip. It's a full keyboard with nothing on top of it. No falling notes, no song to keep up with, no score telling you that you were late. You press keys, you hear notes, that's the whole feature.
That emptiness is the point. Following a song teaches your hands a path someone else laid down. A blank keyboard is where you start laying down your own.
Why "just messing around" is actually composing
Every song you've ever liked started as someone messing around. They found a couple of notes that sounded good together, played them again, and built out from there. There's no secret first step that involves theory. The theory is a way of explaining what already sounded good, after the fact.
So the fastest way to start writing music is to lower the stakes until there are none. Sit at a blank keyboard and play badly on purpose for five minutes. Somewhere in there you'll hit two or three notes that make you stop. That's the seed.
A five-minute way in
If you want something concrete to try:
Play three or four notes near the middle of the keyboard, slowly, in a little pattern. Repeat it until your hand remembers it.
Now hold one low note with your left hand underneath it. That single note is doing the job of a whole chord, and suddenly the pattern sounds like a piece of something.
Change one note in your right-hand pattern and listen to what it does. That's it. That's writing. You're making choices about what sounds right, which is the entire job.
The trick is to record while you do this, because good accidents vanish in seconds. Play the void back and you'll keep going. Don't, and you'll forget the best bit by dinner.
How this works in Piano Aura
Piano Aura has a Freestyle keyboard for exactly this. Open it, pick an instrument, and play with nothing in your way. When you land on something you like, hit record, then name the take and keep it so the idea doesn't evaporate by morning.
You can switch instruments to change the whole feel of an idea. The same little pattern sounds thoughtful on a grand piano and a bit unhinged on a toy piano, and trying it both ways often tells you what the piece actually wants to be.
None of this asks you to read music or know what a key signature is. It asks you to play around and keep the bits you like.
Piano Aura is free on the App Store if you want a blank keyboard to start on.