Controls Reference
Harmonicon is played with your harmonica and microphone — the keyboard and mouse are only for navigating menus and controlling playback, never for playing notes.
Global
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
Esc | Pause/resume during a song; go back one menu level otherwise. |
| Mouse | All menu navigation and pause-menu buttons. |
During gameplay (Play 2D / Play 3D / Jam Session)
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
M | Mute/unmute the metronome click (visual beat indicator keeps working). |
V | Cycle the spectrogram’s visual style. |
A ⏸ button in the bottom-right corner does the same thing as Esc for
pausing — no keyboard required.
Song Editor
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y | Undo / redo |
Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V | Copy the selection / paste it at the mouse position |
Delete / Backspace | Delete the selection |
← / → | Pan the grid |
Esc | Clear the selection, or back out of the editor |
See Song Editor for everything else — grid snap modes, multi-selection, the metronome/count-in, and more.
Menus and dialogs
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
↑ / ↓ (Arrow Up/Down) | Adjust the UI’s overall zoom/scale. |
Esc | Close an open dropdown, cancel a file dialog, or back out one menu level — whichever applies where you are. |
Pause menu (mouse-driven)
The pause menu itself is buttons and sliders, not keybindings, but it’s worth knowing what’s there since it’s easy to miss mid-song. It’s two columns: transport actions on the left, practice aids on the right.
- Resume, Restart, Quit Song (left column)
- Wait for Note — freeze the highway/music at the next unhit note
- Practice Speed — a slider, 50%–100%
- A–B Loop — drag on the song-progress bar to set a loop range; Clear Loop removes it
- Adaptive Difficulty toggle; override a phrase by clicking its rectangle on the progress bar’s bottom strip, then dragging the Learned slider
See Playing a Song for what each of these actually does.
Touch
Harmonicon runs on Android, where there’s no keyboard and no mouse wheel. Every keyboard-only action has an on-screen equivalent, plus two gestures in the Song Editor:
- Drag the tool sidebar to scroll it, when the palette is taller than the screen. (A scrollbar thumb in a column that narrow is not a realistic target for a thumb.)
- Two-finger drag anywhere on the editor to pan the view — sideways through the chart, and vertically if anything is off-screen. Two fingers rather than one, because one finger is already placing, moving and resizing notes.
Switching Options → Button style to icons only makes the sidebar much narrower, which is worth doing on a phone: a landscape screen is wide and short, so spending width costs you nothing and spending height costs you the grid.
Touch is not yet verified on real hardware — it’s been exercised on an emulator only, and hit-target sizes in particular haven’t been tuned for fingers.