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

During gameplay (Play 2D / Play 3D / Jam Session)

A ⏸ button in the bottom-right corner does the same thing as Esc for pausing — no keyboard required.

Song Editor

See Song Editor for everything else — grid snap modes, multi-selection, the metronome/count-in, and more.

Menus and dialogs

The UI’s overall zoom is the Zoom slider in Options, not a keybinding — focus it and ←/→ step it, or drag it with the mouse.

Every screen can be driven from the keyboard alone. The control with focus is outlined by a focus ring, and Tab stays inside whatever modal is open — a confirmation dialog, a file picker, an open dropdown — so it can’t wander onto something you can’t see. A focused button responds to Enter and Space exactly as it does to a click.

Scrolling and touch

Any screen with more content than fits scrolls, and there are three ways to move it:

• the mouse wheel over the content,
• the scrollbar down its right-hand side (which hides itself entirely when everything already fits), or
• dragging the content itself, anywhere on it.

Dragging matters most on a touchscreen, where there’s no wheel and the scrollbar is a thin target. It works everywhere a page scrolls — song and artist lists, the options pages, the lesson tree. Starting a drag on a button doesn’t press it: a short movement is still treated as a tap, and once you’ve moved far enough to be clearly swiping, the button under your finger is let go rather than activated.

The Lessons skill tree scrolls in both directions, so dragging it pans diagonally as well.

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.

In the song picker, the active column header has a highlighted background and a direction arrow; click it again to reverse the order. Sorting keeps the selected song in view. The current song has a bright border. Use Up/Down to move through songs, Home/End to jump to the first/last song, and Enter or Space to start the focused song. Tab and Shift+Tab move between sorting, search, view mode, and songs. Typing in Search filters the list without moving focus away from the field. Search matches partial words in song names, bands, and genres; multiple words can match across those fields. Words of 4–7 characters allow one typo, and longer words allow two, using Levenshtein distance.

The picker shows a result count and a selected-song preview. Hover a song to preview its details without leaving Search. Clear resets search and keeps the field focused; / focuses Search when you are outside a text field. The two-position 2d / 3d switch beside Play shows the active view with a filled background and remembers your choice when you reopen Play Song. Play starts the selected song and is disabled when no songs match.