Play Online
Instruments you can actually play in the browser — not a picture of one. Each is laid out the way the real thing is, down to the order the notes sit in, so what you learn here transfers to the instrument in your hands. Each comes with public-domain songs you can play along to or practise note by note, and a library of 21 to draw from.
Holding a real kalimba? Every song is also written out as printable kalimba tabs, in numbers and letters, sorted by which size of kalimba it fits.
Online kalimba
A virtual thumb piano in 7, 8, 10, 17 and 21-key sizes, with tabs, autoplay and practice mode.
Start playing →Online mbira
A virtual 22-key mbira dzavadzimu in four traditional tunings, with the machachara buzz and a reference pitch you set yourself.
Start playing →Online guzheng
A virtual 21-string Chinese zither with a real glissando, pitch bending, and Mo Li Hua.
Start playing →Online handpan
A virtual handpan, or hang drum, in five maker scales — with the real zigzag field layout and a sustain that never gets cut off.
Start playing →Online oud
A virtual fretless oud with continuous pitch, quarter-tone maqam markers, double courses and a risha tremolo.
Start playing →Online violin
A bowed virtual violin with sustain you control, continuous pitch, vibrato, pizzicato and three fiddle cross tunings.
Start playing →Online harp
A virtual 22, 26 or 34-string lever harp with a working lever on every string, red C strings, and seven keys.
Start playing →Online lyre
A virtual lyre harp in 7, 10 and 16-string sizes, tuned to C major, with tabs, autoplay and practice mode.
Start playing →
Why these sound the way they do
Nothing here downloads a sample pack. Every note is synthesised from a model of how that particular instrument makes sound, and the models are genuinely different from each other. A kalimba tine is a steel bar clamped at one end, so its overtones sit at 1 : 6.27 : 17.5 — nowhere near the neat octaves a string gives you, which is why it pings like metal instead of chiming like a music box. A guzheng string is a string, so its overtones are those octaves, with the faint sharpening real wire gets because it resists bending. It also means the first note sounds the instant you touch it, on any connection, and that transposing the instrument or bending a note produces a real pitch rather than a stretched recording.
A lyre string is a third model again: plain nylon at modest tension over a small frame, so instead of stacking overtones it is simulated as a loop one wavelength long that loses a little energy on each lap — which is what a plucked string physically does, and why it darkens as it fades. A handpan is the fourth and the least like the others: one tone field is three partials a maker hammered into alignment — the fundamental, the octave and the twelfth — so it is synthesised as exactly that, at exactly those ratios, with a tail that runs for ten seconds and darkens as the upper two fade before the first. More instruments are on the way; a marimba is the one people ask for most. In the meantime, if you own the real thing and it has drifted, the instrument tuners will tell you exactly which string or tine moved and by how many cents, and the metronome is there for when it is in tune and the timing is the problem.