Every column is a note of the scale, so nothing you press sounds wrong. Press and drag to bend it, like a string.
Press a column and drag up or down to bend it. Keys A to K play the columns; hold one and pull the mouse down to make it wail.
A piano hands you all twelve notes of the octave and leaves you to avoid the ones that clash with the key of the song. That is a reasonable deal if you have practised for years, and a bad one if you have not. This instrument takes the other side of the trade: you pick a key and a scale, and the eight columns are the notes of that scale, in order. The notes that would clash are simply not on the screen.
The pentatonic scales go further still. Five notes, with no two of them a semitone apart, which is the interval most responsible for a phrase sounding like a mistake. Play the columns in any order, at any speed, and the result sounds deliberate. It is why minor pentatonic is the scale most rock and blues soloing is built from.
A grid of buttons that fires fixed pitches is a novelty. What makes something feel like an instrument is that the pitch keeps moving after the attack: sliding into a note, bending up and holding, a wobble under a finger that never quite settles. Singers do it constantly, guitarists built a whole vocabulary out of it, and it is the first thing missing from music typed into a computer.
So this page has one gesture. Press a column and drag: the pitch follows your finger, continuously, up to a
whole tone either way. Under the hood each voice is two oscillators through a filter, and the bend is a ramp on
the oscillator's detune parameter, which the Web Audio API measures in cents. One hundred cents is
a semitone, so a bend needs no conversion at all, just a ramp to the number your finger is currently at.
Because the wrong notes are not reachable. You pick a key and a scale, and the columns are only the notes of that scale. On a pentatonic there are five of them and none are a semitone apart, so no two columns clash however you combine them.
It bends the note, the way pushing a guitar string sideways does. Hold a column and drag up or down and the pitch follows your finger, up to a whole tone either way.
Yes. A to K play the eight columns and the letter is printed on each. Hold a key and pull the mouse down at the same time and the note wails, hands split across both devices like a whammy bar.
Minor pentatonic to start: it is the most forgiving and the most familiar. Major pentatonic is the brighter version of the same idea. Blues adds the flat five, which is the tense note worth passing through rather than landing on.
No. The sound is generated in your browser with the Web Audio API, and the page makes no network calls once it has loaded.
Not here, which is deliberate: this page is a toy you can open and use in ten seconds. The same instrument inside Gusta Music records what you play onto a track, bends included, and the take arrives as ordinary notes you can edit afterwards.
Gusta Music is the free browser studio this instrument came out of. The same surface lives inside it, playing any of the studio's designed sounds, and Record captures your performance onto a track with the bends intact, as ordinary notes you can edit. Multitrack timeline, sampling, mic recording, and an AI copilot that edits the song with you instead of generating one for you. Your work stays yours.
Open the studio