Virtual recorder: cover the holes, blow, play

How to play

Tap Enable breath control and allow the microphone. Tomus spends about five seconds learning your room: a moment of quiet, one note it plays itself, and one steady blow. Then cover holes and blow — gently, as into a real recorder. The note is set by the holes you cover; your breath sets how loud and how bright it is. Change fingers without stopping your breath and the notes slur into each other. For a repeated note, take a new breath or say “tu” — the tonguing every recorder player learns first.

The beak (mouthpiece) is drawn at the bottom of the screen, where a phone’s microphone is: hold the phone like the recorder and blow across its bottom edge. Flip turns the drawing the way printed charts show it, beak at the top.

The holes

The left thumb covers the hole on the back, drawn beside the first finger hole. The left hand’s first three fingers cover the three holes nearest the beak, the right hand’s four fingers the four below. The lowest two holes are double: a finger in the middle closes both, a finger on one closes only that one — the half-hole that gives C♯, D♯ and G♯. For notes from E6 up, the thumb is pinched half open: touch the small ½ pad instead of the thumb hole.

Any combination of holes plays something, as on a real recorder. When the holes are not a standard fingering, Tomus plays the nearest standard one and shows the note with “≈”.

Soprano recorder fingering chart

Baroque (English) fingering for a soprano — also called descant — recorder in C, the recorder most schools use. It sounds an octave higher than written: the lowest note is written C4 (middle C) and sounds C5. The same fingerings work on a tenor recorder, an octave lower. ● covered, ○ open, ◐ half (thumb pinched); for the double holes, ●○ means only one of the pair is covered.

Not in the chart: C♯7, which needs the end of the recorder covered as well, and D♯7. The chart follows the standard baroque fingering tables (checked hole by hole against the American Recorder Society’s soprano chart). Some notes have alternative fingerings; this chart gives the usual one.

Your microphone stays on your device

Breath control measures only how loud the low rumble of your breath is, many times a second, inside your browser. No sound is recorded, stored or sent anywhere, and the microphone turns off when you leave the page or press Microphone off.

Without a microphone

Hold the Blow button on the beak (higher on it blows harder), or Space on a keyboard. From the keyboard the holes are your own fingers’ keys: A is the thumb, S D F the left hand, J K L ; the right hand, and Q pinches the thumb.

Songs to try

Hold a long note, Hot Cross Buns, Mary Had a Little Lamb, Ode to Joy, Happy Birthday — all public domain, and all starting around B, A and G with the left hand, where beginners start. The holes to cover for the next note are ringed. Replay what you played, and share a link that opens the same song.

The sound

A baroque soprano recorder from the Versilian Community Sample Library, released into the public domain (CC0): thirteen notes, retuned to equal temperament, looped so a note lasts as long as your breath, about 430 KB. They load once the page is ready; until then a synthesised flute plays the same notes.