Loading the instrument… Touch a tine. The lowest note is in the middle, which is how a real board is laid out. Sound could not load.
Key of CTouch it and it plays
The board above is a demo, but the sound is not: seventeen tines sampled from a real kalimba, played through the same engine the app uses, in the order a real board is laid out. Eight more demos are one click away, and a hundred public domain melodies are written out for them.
- 9 instruments
- 100 melodies
- 19 theory pages
- 5 tools
These demos are the workshop cut down to a web page. The rooms they leave out are on a phone:
The instruments
Nine of them, laid out the way they are really played
Every demo mirrors the real instrument: a kalimba climbs outward from the middle, a handpan zigzags around the ding, a guzheng skips the fourth and the seventh. Touch one and it sounds. Each is one board with the basics; the app has the whole room.
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Kalimba
Seventeen tines in C, and the lowest note sits in the middle. The scale climbs outward in alternating directions, so a run of notes falls naturally between two thumbs.
Play it in the browser -
Handpan
A ding in the centre and nine tone fields zigzagging around it, tuned to B Celtic. Steel that has been hammered cannot be retuned, which is why a pan plays one scale and plays it beautifully.
Play it in the browser
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Guzheng
Twenty-one strings, pentatonic, with the two strings you press to reach fa and ti.
Play it in the browser -
Piano
Two octaves, C4 to C6, with the black keys offset where they really sit.
Play it in the browser -
Guitar
Six strings and six open chords. Drag a finger across them to strum.
Play it in the browser
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Drums
Twelve pads in the positions a player actually reaches for.
Play it -
Violin
Four strings, first position, and nothing at all to tell you where the notes are.
Play it -
Xylophone
Ten bars, long to short, with the dots on the nodes where a bar is quiet.
Play it -
Accordion
The right-hand keyboard, and the bellows that decide whether it speaks.
Play it
Four more rooms behind the instruments
The browser gives you the boards. The app adds the rooms where a tune gets written, taught, and conducted.
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Learn
A hundred melodies taught note by falling note, on whichever of the nine instruments you pick.
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Song Maker
Draw a melody on the grid and the room plays it back at tempo, in the key you chose.
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The Band
Sketch a groove and a percussion band strikes exactly what you hear.
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The Orchestra
Raise the baton and lead winds, brass, strings and timpani through real conducting patterns.
A hundred melodies
Public domain, and every one from a named source
The catalogue is exported straight out of the app, never retyped, so the web and the app can never disagree. Each song page draws the melody as a ribbon you can tap note by note, says which instruments can reach it and by how much they have to transpose, and links to the transcription it came from.
The theory
Explained once, then playable in the sentence
Nineteen short pages on intervals, scales, chords, keys and rhythm. Every example is a button: the page says a minor third is three semitones, and then you press it and hear three semitones. That is the part a printed chart cannot do.
Five things you would otherwise open a second tab for
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Tuner
Reads the note off your microphone, harmonics and all.
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Metronome
Clicks on the audio clock, so it does not drift.
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Chord finder
Twelve roots, twelve shapes, lit on the keys.
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Scale finder
And which of the nine can actually play it.
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Circle of fifths
Twenty-four keys you can press and hear.
Get the app
Take the whole workshop with you
The browser hands you nine boards. The app hands you the same nine with layouts you can resize and retune, the lessons, the grid, the band and the orchestra, and every sound is already on the device.
- Works with the plane in the air. Every sound is bundled.
- Available in 21 languages, on phones and on tablets.
- Nine instruments, a hundred lessons, a band and an orchestra.
- iPhone, iPad and Android, phone or tablet.
Both listings are still in review. These become links the day they are published.
