Lessons

Play → Lessons is a guided curriculum, grouped into units shown as tabs across the top, with a scrollable list of that unit’s lessons below.

Lessons unlock in order: each one lists its prerequisite(s), and shows locked (🔒, dimmed, not clickable) until you’ve passed them. A passed lesson gets a ✓ and stays replayable any time. Your progress is saved (profile.json) and survives restarting the game.

Clicking an unlocked lesson opens its reader page: instructional text explaining the technique, a goal line (e.g. “Goal: 70% overall accuracy”), and a Start Lesson button (or Mark as Done, for the couple of lessons that are pure instruction with no drill — like tongue blocking, which the microphone genuinely can’t tell apart from puckering, so it isn’t scored).

Unit 1 — Blowing the Harmonica

Single clean notes, chords, tongue blocking, octave splits, slides, and hand-shape/wah — the physical fundamentals of getting a controlled sound out of the instrument, before rhythm or improvisation enter the picture. Breathing and long tones, your first bends (working up to the deep 2- and 3-draw bends 2nd-position blues lives on), vibrato, and “ta-ka” tongued articulation round out the fundamentals.

Unit 2 — Counting the Blues

The 12-bar form, playing in time, call-and-response (Harmonicon plays a short phrase, you echo it back — the game waits for you, however long you need), and finally improvisation: the only lesson with no fixed notes to hit at all. It opens an ordinary Jam Session and judges you on how much of what you played landed on a chord tone or in the blues scale, via the same live hole-map coloring Jam Session itself uses. When you feel done, open the pause menu and click Finish Lesson. Counting drills (four-on-the-floor down to just beat 1, then a full 12-bar walk of chord roots and the turnaround that leads back to the top), a straight-vs-shuffle feel drill, and the classic train chug — including a chorus that genuinely speeds up — round out the unit.

Most drills are scored exactly like a normal Play 2D song underneath — same falling notes, same HUD — with the pass/fail judgment layered on top of the ordinary results screen instead of a song’s usual best-score tracking.

Unit 3 — Blues Vocabulary

The bridge from drills to music. You start with the 2nd-position blues scale itself, then learn three short original licks call-and-response style — the game plays each one, you echo it back — followed by a set of licks built specifically around the “crying” bent notes, and finally a full 12-bar chorus that places a different lick over each chord.

From there it’s three more open-jam lessons, each judged on a different slice of your playing: land specifically on chord tones as the chords change (not just anywhere in the scale), improvise over a minor blues progression instead of the usual major one, and — the last lesson — leave real space, playing two bars and resting two bars through the whole form. All three use the same “Finish Lesson” pause-menu flow as Unit 2’s improvisation lesson.