EarBop — manual

EarBop works out the right notes over every chord, writes them into the chart, and listens through the microphone to hear whether you played them. This manual goes through every feature and every setting.

What this is for

You cannot learn jazz from an app.

Jazz is learned by listening, by transcribing, and by playing with people. No software does that for you, and EarBop does not pretend to.

EarBop is a practice-room tool. It is the thing you have running while you do the real work. A metronome does not teach you music either and nobody holds that against it — this one simply knows more about harmony, and it can hear you.

It does three things that otherwise eat your practice time:

• It works out the notes. You never stop to figure out the ♯11 of this chord, or where the tritone substitution lands on that one. The app computes it and writes it under the chord — in any key, over any harmony, including the one you paste in yourself.
• It carries the form. Voice leading, register, where the line has to turn so it stays inside your range. The things you otherwise do slowly, in pencil.
• It hears you. This is the part nothing else does. The app knows whether you actually played the note or only thought you did. In Practice you move on by hitting the notes, not by the clock running out.

The clearest case is this one: you transcribed a phrase off a record. That work — listening, hunting for it, writing it down — is the valuable part, and the app will not take it away from you. But running that phrase through twelve keys and catching yourself the moment your hand slips is labour that teaches nobody anything by itself. That part it takes.

So: listen to the records. Transcribe. Go and play with people. And for the hours that have to be put in alone in a practice room, put this on.

What EarBop is

EarBop is a jazz improvisation trainer. You pick the harmony and what you want to practise — guide tones, an arpeggio, a scale, a phrase of your own — and the app works out the right notes over every chord, writes them underneath it, and listens through the microphone to hear whether you played or sang them.

What makes it different from a stack of exercises on paper is three things. The app computes those notes rather than looking them up — so it works over any harmony at all, including one you type in or paste from iReal Pro, and in any of the twelve keys. It understands the harmony: it can tell which seventh chord is a real dominant and which is not, and picks scales accordingly. And it hears you, so in Practice you move on by hitting the notes, not by time running out.

It is one HTML page with no dependencies. It runs in a browser, it can be installed as an app, and once installed it works offline. Nothing you put into it leaves your browser.

It is for anyone who plays or sings one note at a time: singers, wind players, guitar, piano with one hand, double bass. The microphone recognises one note at a time — not chords (see Microphone).

First run

On the first run a welcome screen asks two questions. What do you play — one choice sets the tuning (C, B♭, E♭), the kind of instrument the microphone listens for, and the range. What do you want to practise — the recommended start (guide tones on II–V–I), arpeggios or walking bass on a blues, your own tune from iReal Pro, or the library. Then you turn the microphone on and play. The welcome screen can be reopened in Settings → Welcome setup; further tips appear once each, at the moment they are useful.

• Turn the microphone on — the microphone button at the top, or the M key. The browser will ask for permission; without it the app still works, it just cannot hear you.
• Kind of instrument — Settings → Your instrument (the welcome screen sets it too). This is not cosmetic: it tells the app how low your instrument goes, and the length of the analysis window follows from it. With the wrong setting the lowest notes are not heard at all. Choices: Voice · Guitar / horn · Cello / trombone / bassoon · Double bass / bass guitar / tuba · Anything.
• Range — in the exercise panel, Range section. The welcome screen sets it from your instrument; change it any time, presets included (voice · guitar · sax · bass · piano).
• Headphones — Settings → Microphone → Headphones. Turn it on when you have them on. The microphone then stays open while the app plays, and you can answer during the chord. On speakers leave it off, or the app would hear itself.

Input device is worth setting too: if your instrument goes through an audio interface, pick it — it is cleaner and quieter for everyone else. The less common settings (output device, voice commands, sound downloads, harmony analysis and more) are in Settings under the folded Advanced section.

Three ways to work

The switch in the top bar. These are three different things, not three speeds of the same thing.

In Practice you can have the chord sound once as you arrive at it and then leave you alone: Settings → Play the chord when you reach it — Never, Every chord, or First chorus only. That last one is the best exercise: the first time round reminds you of the harmony, the second time you have to remember it.

In the same place is Play the right note on a mistake — off by default, because training your ear means finding the note, not being told it.

Tempo is in the top bar. The band's style (swing, bossa, ballad, waltz), the transposition and which instruments play are under the Band and key button; in Play along and Demo the instrument switches are also right in the bar. The count-in and the levels of the instruments are in Settings → Backing.

Rhythm of the tones: in the exercise panel you choose eighth notes, quarter notes or triplets. In eighths the tones run from the chord's first beat and the rest of the bar is a rest; in quarters there is one tone a beat, so a four-note arpeggio fills the bar; in triplets three tones go to a beat. Start (On 1 · On the “and” of 1 · On 2) displaces the line: the chord tones stop landing on the strong beat, and you learn to hear the harmony without leaning on beat one. You hear the displacement best in Demo and see it in the notation; in Practice and Play along you play the rhythm yourself and the app checks only the notes. When the line does not fit the chord, it starts on 1, or falls back to eighths. Licks, walking bass and the Barry Harris descending scale keep their own rhythm.

The tune

Click the tune's name at the top, or the book icon. The library has three tabs: Songs, Exercises (the ones you saved) and Licks.

What is in the library

Thirty-seven practice progressions in folders: the basic cadences and turnarounds, diminished chords and chromatic motion, blues and rhythm changes, modal and groove vamps, and three kinds of endless exercise — the cycle of fourths, stepwise shifts and interval leaps. Each one says what it is for. The folders fold away.

No standards ship with the app — that is deliberate, not an omission. The harmonies of standards are protected, and the app does not need them: it computes its notes from whatever it is given.

Your own tunes

Three ways, all of them in the library:

• A link from iReal Pro. Paste a single link, a whole playlist, or a whole page of links at once — including the file iReal Pro makes when you send tunes to yourself (open it in any editor, select all, paste). The tunes land in the Mine folder. The globe beside the field goes to the iReal Pro forum, where those links live. A tune you already have is skipped. If duplicates got into Mine earlier, a Remove duplicates button appears by the folder — it keeps the copy of each tune that came first.
• Type it yourself. Bars separated by |, sections in square brackets: [A] Dm7 G7 | Cmaj7 | [B] Fm7 Bb7 | Ebmaj7. Two chords in one bar go one after the other.
• Build it in the chart. In Edit you add bars and write the chords straight into them.

None of it leaves your browser.

The loop

The loop button in the top bar, then click the first and the last bar. Only that stretch repeats — the two bars that keep falling apart, until they stop. Escape clears the selection.

What you practise

Twelve goals. The target button, or What you practise in the bottom bar on a phone. Each goal explains itself in its own panel; here is what tells them apart and what each one lets you set.

Two settings that apply to everything

Minor chords take their mode from the key (on by default). Off, every minor seventh is dorian — safe reading. On, the key decides: ii is dorian, iii phrygian, vi aeolian, so the line stays in the key the way a bebop phrase does. It only touches chords that really belong to the key.

Dominants by function (on by default). Not every seventh chord is a dominant: a blues I7 and IV7, or a backdoor ♭VII7, resolve nowhere, so altered tensions have no business on them. The app works this out and writes above the chord what it thinks that chord is doing. After a minor ii it gives the dominant a phrygian dominant; after a major one, mixolydian.

The descending scale: why it matters where you start

A seven-note scale falls an octave in an odd number of eighths, so the chord tones change sides of the beat every octave and back again. One added chromatic note evens it out — that is why it is there, not for colour. The app takes whichever of the sheet's three scales (seventh, major, minor) belongs to the chord, and reads the chords the sheet has no row for (m7, half-diminished) by its own rule on their own mode. A diminished chord gets the sixth chord a half step above it, because that is what it is.

Start on a note of the chord and the chord lands on the beat. On seventh chords those are degrees 1, 3, 5 and 7; on sixth chords 1, 3, 5 and 6 — the sheet prints 1-3-5-7 on all three of its pages, but those are the seventh chord's own tones. A sixth chord's fourth tone is the sixth, so there the sixth degree gets the half steps and the seventh falls into the other category.

Start anywhere else and the chord tones land off the beat. That is not a fault: what lands on the beat then is the diminished chord — a sound of its own, the one Barry Harris pairs with the sixth chord. The app always says, under the switches, where the tones actually fell in your tune.

Chromatic notes offers three choices. Fewest is the sheet's basic row; More, low and More, high are its second answers — ten notes to the octave, so five beats for four chord tones, which means one beat necessarily carries a note from outside the chord. On minor chords the sheet asks for a half step between the 3rd and the 2nd, where there is no room left; in the margin Dr. Harris notes that this one may be “any note in the scale”, and the app puts it where it leaves the most chord tones on the beat.

Movement between chords

The Movement between chords section at the top of the exercise panel. Two things that decide how the line sounds.

Voice leading

Every chord starts on the note nearest the last note of the one before it. The exercise keeps its own order; it is only turned round. Two modes:

• Common tone — when the next chord has that note, the line stays on it. One chord ends and the next begins on the same note.
• Always move — the common tone may not be held; the line goes to the second nearest.

The form is a circle, not a line. The note the last chord ends on is the one the first chord leads from — so there is no jump where it comes round. The average jump across that join is 2.5 semitones; without it, it was 8.3.

Enclosures (approach notes)

Every target note gets notes that approach it. Six shapes: A half step from above · A half step from below · A half step above, then below · A half step below, then above · Diatonically above, chromatically below · A four-note wrap.

With that, Every note or only one chosen one, and Inside the line or Pickup → target on the downbeat.

The arrows are not decoration. They say direction and distance both: ↗ ↘ is a half step, ⇗ ⇘ a whole tone. That is the thing you need to see — a half step is a leading note and it pulls, a whole tone is a step of the scale and it does not — and the mark is the same whichever rule produced the note.

When a wrap does not fit the bar, the app thins it. A four-note wrap on every note of a triad wants fifteen notes; when the chord has half a bar, that is four eighths. Where a chord shares its bar with another, the wrap is cut back: first to the one note on the downbeat, then to a shorter shape, and only then not at all. A chord that has a bar to itself is left exactly as you set it. When the app has thinned a wrap, it says so on that chord in Edit.

And if one particular bar reads badly to you, in Edit you set the wrap on it yourself — As set / One half step / None.

Order and direction

The Order section. Three choices say in what order the shape is played inside the chord; the fourth decides its register across the whole form.

• Up · Down · Alternate — the shape upwards, downwards, or reversed bar by bar. On guide tones this is 3 → 7, 7 → 3, Alternate.
• Up through the range — one line that never restarts.
• Your own order — you tick several orders (1·3·5·7, 1·5·3·7, 7·5·3·1…) and they rotate chord by chord. That is how permutations are practised.

Up through the range

This one is a different thing from the rest. The line does not restart when the chord changes: it carries on from the note it is on to the next tone of the new chord above it, and at the top of your range it turns and comes back down. It is the endless scale, but over chord tones.

The step is one and nothing else: the next tone of the chord above the note the line is standing on. That holds across a chord change too — after the seventh of one chord comes the next chord's tone above it, always. The only thing that breaks the step is the end of the range: there the line turns and carries on down from the same note, even if that falls in the middle of a bar. The note it turned on is marked ⤺ on the staff — the same mark the endless scale uses.

Over Dm7 G7 | Cmaj7 A7 a seventh arpeggio behaves like this:

Dm7     D3 F3 A3 C4     1 ♭3 5 ♭7
G7      D4 F4 G4 B4     5 ♭7 1 3
Cmaj7   C5 E5 G5 B5     1 3 5 7
A7      A5 G5 Eb5 Db5   1 ♭7 ♭5 3   ← top of the range, it turns

So the arpeggio is no longer always from the root — on G7 it comes in on the fifth, because that is where the line had got to, and the app names it that way too. No step is wider than a major third and nowhere is there a jump back to a starting register. Over a blues it runs two and a half octaves up and all the way back down.

Voice leading is not offered alongside it — the run leads itself from chord to chord, so there is nothing left to decide. It works on arpeggios, guide tones, structures and your own intervals.

The pivot and a written lick are the exception: they have a shape that is meant to hold, so they climb by whole octaves and keep their voice leading.

On a pivot the Order section offers only One register / Up through the range — a pivot is a fixed figure, and neither direction nor permutation has anything to say to it.

Range

The Range section at the foot of every exercise panel. The lowest and the highest note the exercise is held between, plus presets for voice · guitar · saxophone · bass · piano.

It is not decoration and it is not only for the Scale, where it used to live. Every rule in the app that decides register reads from this range — the default line is placed in the middle of what you set. With a bass range you get D2 F2 A2 C3 where a voice range gave D4 F4 A4 C5.

The default range is C3–C6 (48–84), which is a voice.

What the app does at the edge

The rule “move as little as you can” thinks only about the note before, so across a cycle of fourths the line walks smoothly out of the range. The app folds it back a whole octave — the same notes, one octave over. On the cycle of fourths that means over thirty steps of a semitone and one octave jump.

It only does this on a real drift. A semitone or two past the edge is left alone, because jumping an octave to fix one semitone would wreck the voice leading and mend nothing. So expect a tolerance of roughly a tone or so at the edges.

When the figure is taller than the whole range (a very narrow range and a four-note arpeggio) there is nothing to be done — only whole octaves are available. The app puts it where it hangs out the least.

Walking bass has a range of its own (Register: Comfortable / Whole instrument), in bass numbers, so the general range is not offered there.

Microphone

This is the thing that sets EarBop apart from a stack of exercises on paper, so it is worth knowing what it can do and where it stops.

How it works

The app compares the signal with a delayed copy of itself (autocorrelation) and looks for the period. It needs a window several periods of the lowest note long — which is why Kind of instrument matters: the open E of a double bass is 41 Hz, a period three times longer than anything a voice does. A note is accepted only once the same one has been measured three times running.

Echo cancellation, noise suppression and automatic gain control are all switched off in the browser — all three eat exactly the quiet held notes it is listening for.

The measured numbers

Synthesised tones fed straight into the detector, so the true pitch is known. These are therefore upper bounds — a real instrument in a real room is worse, never better. The measurement can be repeated: node tests/mic.js.

Where the limits are

It is monophonic detection. It hears one note. Not a chord — that is not a missing feature, that is the method.

From which follows the one real limitation: when the previous note is still ringing under the new one (guitar, piano, a room with reverb), the pair correlates at the period of the pair, not of one note. A note with a fifth below it repeats at the octave below them both, so the app would answer an octave low.

The app defends against this: before it accepts a period, it looks at half of it, a third, a quarter and a fifth. If the signal repeats there almost as strongly, that shorter period is the real note. Measured:

So: let the previous note fall below half the volume and it is fine. Two notes at the same level are a chord and nothing helps there. In practice this means damping the strings on a guitar and not holding the pedal on a piano. It does not affect singers and wind players at all.

All the microphone settings

Microphone settings:

• Input device — a microphone, or an interface with an instrument plugged into it. The names appear once you have allowed the microphone.
• Kind of instrument (Your instrument section) — five modes, see First run. Each shows its range.
• Sensitivity — input gain. Raise it for quiet singing.
• Headphones — the microphone stays open while the app plays.
• Output device (under Advanced) — which device the app plays through.

Saying it out loud, and Focus

Say it out loud

When both hands are on the instrument, the two things you reach for most often in Practice can be asked for out loud: play the intervals and play the chord.

It is not speech recognition and it does not go over the internet. You teach it your own two words — you say each one three times and the app keeps a rough picture of how it sounds. They can be any words in any language, or a whistle. It then listens on the microphone the app is using anyway: it works in every browser, offline, and nothing leaves this device.

Anything that holds a steady pitch is ignored — that is the instrument, not you.

Settings → Advanced → Voice commands. Teach again and Forget are there too.

Focus

The button next to the microphone. On a computer it sweeps everything off the screen except the chart and makes the chords bigger.

On a phone Focus does more: two bars fill the staff — the one sounding on top, and the next one directly under it at the same size, only dimmer. You read ahead and you do not lose your place. The chord is big enough to see from a distance — on a desk, on a stand.

It scrolls bar by bar with the music by itself, and you can move it with a finger too. At the end of the form it falls on downwards into the next chorus; the whole form does not roll back to the top.

The choice is remembered between sessions.

Edit — it is your chart

The Edit button in the top bar, then click a chord. The app analyses harmony well, but not always the way you hear it — and here you have the last word.

In the chord panel:

• Intervals — a palette you click together to say what should be played on this chord. The arrows move a degree an octave, × throws it out. An interval may come back — 1 2 3 4 3 4 is a sequence, not a mistake.
• The wrap on this chord — As set / One half step / None. When the app has thinned a wrap itself to make it fit the bar, it says so here.
• Scale — on the Scale goal and on your own intervals, a different scale can be pinned to this one chord. The pattern stays as written; the notes under it move.
• Join / Split ii–V — two bars of ii–V can be joined onto one scale so the line runs across both. On the Scale goal the app does this by itself when a ii–V sits in one bar; here you overrule it.
• Back to the goal — clears everything you overwrote on this chord.

An exercise written chord by chord

The goal in the settings says what the whole form plays. In Edit you can give one chord a goal of its own — This chord plays — and the setting then becomes only what the other chords play. An arpeggio everywhere and your own tensions on the dominants, guide tones in one place, a pentatonic in another. What you pick sounds exactly as it would if you had set that goal for the whole form.

The panel stays where you put it (drag it by its header), and clicking another chord shows that chord's settings — a whole chorus can be walked through without closing the panel. Each chord keeps its own intervals, scale and wrap beside its goal; if you reach into the palette after picking a goal, the notes are overwritten and the rest of that chord's settings stay.

Four goals cannot be given this way: Scale, Descending scale, Walking bass and Lick. They are not figures on a chord — each of them carries a register or a rhythm through the whole form, so on a single chord they would play something other than what they promise. One note a chord is missing for the same reason: its whole point is the note carried from chord to chord, and a single chord has nothing to carry it from.

The interval palette on a chord has octave arrows under the numbers (↑ ↓ on every written degree, up to two octaves either way) and approach-note arrows — ↗ a half step from below, ↘ a half step from above, ⇗ ⇘ a step of the scale. They are the same four arrows you write in the Lick grid, and the same rule holds: an arrow has no number of its own, it leans on the note written after it. Two arrows before one number wrap it from both sides, so you can write a wrap by hand on a single chord, in whatever order you want, without turning enclosures on for the whole form. An arrow with no note after it does not play.

In Edit you also rewrite the chords themselves and add bars, when you are building a harmony from nothing.

Above a chord the app writes what it thinks that chord is doing — the ii of some key, a dominant that resolves, a blues I7 that resolves nowhere. It can be turned off (Dominants by function) if it is in your way.

A word of warning about sharing: what you overwrite in Edit is pinned to its position in this form. That is why an exercise containing anything of the sort always carries the tune with it.

Lick — your own phrase

The Lick goal. You write one phrase and the app finds it throughout the tune, in any key.

The rhythm grid

You tap a cell and pick an interval. An empty cell lets the note before it go on sounding; a rest ends it. The beat number switches between eighths and a triplet. Accents are set in the same place.

What the numbers mean — Chord intervals (3 is the third of that chord), or Scale degrees (3 is the third degree of the scale that belongs to the chord — so a minor third over a minor chord). The second is what you usually want: one pattern that answers every chord.

A cell can also hold a direction instead of a number — an approach note has no number, only a side. Write the note it belongs to after it and the app works it out. Two arrows in a row wrap it from both sides — that is an enclosure written by hand.

The pickup

Almost no bebop phrase starts on the downbeat — it sets off a beat or two earlier, across the chord before it, and lands on the strong beat. The extra beats appear at the start of the grid, counted backwards: −2, −1. You write them like any other beat; they sound across the end of the previous chord, and in the notation the app marks them in italics.

Where it is played

On which chords: Dominants · Major · Minor · ii–V · Turnaround · Your own progression.

For your own progression, write the sequence to be found: bars separated by |, symbols in C (Em7 A7 | Dm7 G7) or degrees (iii VI7 | ii V7). A colon sets the length: Em7:3 A7:1. The app then finds that progression in every key and says in how many places in the tune it fits.

Play across the whole bar on a ii–V — the joined stretch is written in the degrees of one chord, the way a long line across a ii–V is really felt. It applies to this phrase only; the other goals keep both chords separate.

Other chords — what the chords play where the phrase is not.

The phrase library

The Licks tab in the library. Taking one phrase changes only that phrase and nothing around it, so you can run twenty of them through one tune. A slash in the category makes a drawer inside a drawer — “Bebop / Parker”. Every lick and every drawer has Share (sends them as a link; whoever opens it adds the licks to their own — anything they already have is not doubled) and Delete. Deleting a drawer takes the drawers inside it too; on a built-in drawer it deletes your licks and only hides the built-in ones.

Several licks at once: in the Lick panel, add more licks beside the one in the editor (Add the one in the editor, or pick from the library). Each plays on its own chords — one on the minor chords, another on the dominants. A chord gets the first lick that fits it; Edit swaps a lick with the one in the editor.

Dominant into minor: when a dominant leads to a minor chord (G7 → Cm7), the natural 9 and 13 in the lick are lowered to ♭9 and ♭13 on their own. This applies to chord intervals; in scale degrees the scale takes care of it.

Substitution: in Edit, on a dominant, choose SubV7 (the lick is played over the chord a tritone up, G7 → D♭7) or + minor third (G7 → B♭7). The chart names the substitute under the lick.

Half improvisation (Play along only): the chords without a lick are yours — nothing is written, judged or played — and the intervals appear only where the lick has to be played.

A phrase sounds in the register it is written in. No jumping: when it falls outside the range, the whole phrase moves, never one note out of it.

To give a phrase to someone, use Share on the lick — the link carries the whole phrase and its settings.

Notation and printing

The whole exercise on staves

The whole form on real staves, bar by bar: the chord above every bar, the notes you are practising written in the staff — in your key and your transposition — and the name of the interval under each of them.

The rhythm is the one Demo plays: eighths (or quarter notes, if you choose them) from the chord's first beat, a note a beat for walking bass, written straight, the way swung eighths are always written. Approach notes stand in italics before their target. Walking bass gets a bass clef.

It is the second choice behind the printer icon at the top. It opens as a printable page — save it as a PDF or put it on the stand. The notes are spaced naturally, with sensible room between bars and staves, and each interval sits right under its note.

The notes are set from the Bravura fonts (SMuFL), not images — so they print sharp at any size.

A lick in all twelve keys

On the Lick goal there is Print in all keys: the phrase on staves, one key to a line, each with the right key signature. A practice sheet for the stand.

In the grid you write in a reference key with no key signature; the key signature is added by the print.

Printing the chart

The printer icon at the top → Chord chart — clean: just the chords in their bars, no tones and no highlighting, four bars to a line, in your key and transposition. For the stand or the band.

Saving, sharing, installing

My exercises

The My exercises section in the exercise panel. Everything on the screen is saved: the tune, what you are practising, and every setting around it — including what you wrote chord by chord in Edit, which is exactly why the tune is saved with it.

On saving you give it a name, a description and a category. A category can be created right there and is folded away by default, to keep the list readable. Saved exercises live in the library, the Exercises tab; they can be deleted one at a time or by category.

Sharing by link

Share this setup makes a link. Whoever opens it gets exactly your setup — including the tune, where that is needed. Nothing is sent anywhere; the whole exercise is encoded in that address.

When a shared exercise uses something from the full version and the other person does not have it, the app saves it for them whole and untouched and switches them to the nearest free goal. Once they get the full version, the exercise works as you sent it.

Loading somebody else's link is in the library: Load a shared exercise.

Installing, and offline

EarBop is a PWA. From a real web address it can be installed (Settings → Install, or “add to home screen” in the browser). Installed, it runs full screen with no address bar, and it works offline.

The recorded instruments are stored on the device as the app needs them. Settings → Advanced → Download everything for offline fetches every note of all four instruments at once — a few megabytes, once. Worth doing on wifi before you go and practise somewhere without a signal; anything not downloaded is played by synthesis.

In the installed app you cannot zoom or pan — the chart is measured to the screen it is drawn on, so there is nothing to zoom into and it would only be knocked out of place. Scrolling inside things (drawers, Focus) still works.

Free and full

The full version is a one-off €15. No subscription. A key is good for two devices; a device that comes back does not use up another place.

The rule behind it

It is not a list of features drawn out of a hat. The wall stands on one rule:

Free proves what the app claims — that it works out the right notes over every chord of any exercise, in every key, for your instrument and your range, and hears whether you played them. That includes all the material you start from, and everything that is access rather than a feature.

The full version is the ways of working on that material.

What is where

Two things that are free on purpose

Up through the range. It is the feature a person tells somebody else about — and a demo is there to give a thing like that away, not hide it.

Range. For a singer or a bass player that is not a feature but a condition of the app being usable at all. You do not pay for usable.

A locked choice is always visible and carries a lock — knowing what is behind the wall is the point of the wall. Tapping it opens the offer and changes nothing.

Shortcuts, and when something does not work

Keyboard shortcuts

When something does not work

The microphone will not start. The browser has to give permission — there is an icon in the address bar where it is switched. In an iframe (the app embedded in another page) the browser may forbid it altogether; open the app in a tab of its own.

It does not hear the lowest notes. Check Kind of instrument (Settings → Your instrument). On Voice a double bass low E will not be heard — the window is too short. Switch to Double bass / bass guitar / tuba.

It answers an octave low. The previous note is still ringing under the new one. Damp the strings, do not hold the pedal. Details under Microphone.

The app answers its own chords. Turn Headphones off if you are playing through a speaker — otherwise the app hears itself.

It is quieter than the detector wants. Raise the Sensitivity. The threshold is around a peak of 0.02.

A bar is unreadable, too many notes. A four-note wrap on every note is a lot of notes. Make the wrap smaller, or wrap only one note, or turn it off on that one chord in Edit.

The instruments sound synthesised. The recordings have not downloaded yet. Settings → Advanced → Download everything for offline.

The welcome screen again: Settings → Welcome setup.