Bending Trainer

Play → Bending Trainer is a practice screen for controlling one bend at a time: no song, just the hole you’re working on, a live picture of your pitch, and the harmonica’s full bend diagram. It’s a tool for finding, holding and releasing a bend, not a lesson, so it never grades you pass or fail.

The screen has three parts:

• A strip across the top for the things you set once and leave: Setup (your harp’s key and the pitch detector, summarised as e.g. C harp · FFT), Scope and Practice (below), the metronome with its tempo buttons, and Advanced.
• The target card, the large panel at the centre. It shows what you’re practising and how close you are, with every button the current attempt needs.
• The harmonica diagram, beside the card on a wide screen and below it when a tablet is held upright. The layout follows the tablet as you turn it.

Setup and Advanced open as panels that float over the screen, so opening one never moves the pitch display you’re watching. Press the same button again to close it.

Picking a target

Click any cell in the diagram to make it the target. You can also press Tab to focus the diagram, move around it with the arrow keys, and press Enter or Space to choose a cell. The target card names the hole and technique, and says how it has gone for you so far (Not practised yet, or e.g. 7 of 10 controlled).

Natural plays the hole’s unbent note and Target plays the note you’re aiming for, as clean reference tones, so you can hear the interval before you try to bend it. Check natural note is an optional first step: it asks for the unbent note on that hole, which confirms the microphone is following the right hole. It also measures where that reed actually sits on your harp, since real reeds rarely match the textbook tuning exactly. From then on, that hole is judged against your harp rather than the table.

Reading the pitch rail

The tuner line reports how far you are from the target and in which direction. It only does so for notes that belong to the selected hole: silence, the wrong hole and an unsteady signal each get their own message instead of a misleading number.

Below it, the rail runs from the natural note on the left to the target band on the right. The bright marker is your pitch right now, and the fading dots behind it are the last few seconds of movement. From them you can see a smooth approach, a scoop, an overshoot past the target, or a pitch that settled. When a hole has several bend depths, the shallower ones are marked along the way to a deeper target. Three separate readouts sit under the rail: distance from the target, how steady the pitch is, and how long you’ve held it centred.

Practice and the drill

Practice chooses what counts as one success. Free exploration adds nothing. The other shapes ask you to find and hold the target, bend and come back to the natural note, repeat the bend on metronome beats, climb through the bend depths and back, or attack and release an overbend. The status next to the button shows which stage you’re at.

Scope chooses which targets the drill uses: First bends (holes 2 and 3 draw bends, the default), All bends, Blow bends, Overbends, or Custom. With Custom selected, clicking diagram cells adds them to the drill or takes them out again.

Turn on Drill and Harmonicon picks targets for you from that scope. It favours ones you haven’t tried, ones you control less reliably or less steadily, and ones you haven’t practised for a while. It moves on when you complete the chosen practice shape. Skip moves on straight away. Neither Skip nor putting the harp down counts against you: an attempt only counts once the microphone has heard you play that hole. Your record is saved between sessions.

The diagram doubles as a progress map. Each cell is tinted by how often you control it, and a bar along its bottom edge grows with the same number, so you can read your progress without telling red from green. Cells you’ve never tried have no bar.

Advanced

Advanced is for precision work, and you can ignore it entirely. It sets the tolerance, how long a hold must last, how long an attempt may take, the A4 reference pitch, how much pitch history the rail shows and how much it’s smoothed, and how many pulses per beat the Repeated shape asks for. Its This attempt section shows your mean distance from the target, how widely the pitch wandered, your best hold, and your vibrato’s speed and width. It also shows the measured reed centre from Check natural note, with Forget measured reed to discard it. Reset puts every setting back. These readings describe the pitch and nothing else: the trainer makes no claims about breath, embouchure or the health of your reeds, because a microphone can’t tell.

Leaving

There’s no pause menu here, because there’s no song to pause. Click Back in the header, or press Esc, to return to the Play menu. Your drill progress is saved on the way out.