Lessons

Play → Lessons is a guided curriculum, drawn as a skill tree. Along the top runs a row of unit nodes — Unit 1, Unit 2, and so on — and each unit’s lessons hang below it, connected by the order you take them in. The tree is wider and taller than the window: scroll in both directions to see the rest of it.

There are two locks. A lesson shows dark until you’ve passed whatever it leads on from — hover it and the tooltip names what it’s still waiting on. A whole unit stays shut until you’ve passed most of the one before it; the number on a unit node (“3/8”) is how many of its lessons you’ve done and how many open the next unit. It’s most, not all — one lesson you’re stuck on shouldn’t wall off the rest of the course.

Colour is the skill each lesson belongs to (bending, rhythm, tone…). Some nodes also carry a ring of dots above them: that’s a training ladder, and the filled dots are how much of it you’ve cleared. A ladder is five drills on the same technique, each harder than the last — isolated and slow, then faster, then across every hole the lesson covers, then inside a phrase, then shuffled so you can’t run it from memory. The bend lessons are the ones that have them; a lesson with no ring has no ladder. A passed lesson stays replayable any time, and your progress is saved (profile.json) and survives restarting the game.

Clicking a lesson — locked or not — opens its reader page: instructional text explaining the technique, a goal line (e.g. “Goal: 70% overall accuracy”), a Start Lesson button, and the ladder’s tiers if it has any.

About twenty lessons show Mark as Done instead. Those are pure instruction with nothing to score — tongue blocking, for instance, which the microphone genuinely can’t tell apart from puckering, or the practice-skills lessons, which are about how you work rather than what you play. Rather than pretend to grade them, the game asks you to say when you’ve read and understood them.

Practice tools on the page

Some reader pages carry interactive tools below the explanation, there to play with before you start the drill. They never affect your score — completion still comes from Start Lesson or Mark as Done.

• Circle of fifths — the twelve keys arranged so each neighbour is a fifth away, with the harp’s key at the top and its playing positions marked. Step it up or down a semitone to see the same relationships from another harmonica’s point of view; position lessons show only the position they’re teaching, so the picture stays uncluttered.
• 12-bar grid — the form laid out as twelve boxes, coloured by chord. Step the highlight forward or back a bar, or reset it to the top. The chords shown follow whichever progression the lesson is about: the standard blues, a quick change, a minor blues, or the jazz blues.
• Metronome — start and stop it, nudge the tempo by 5 BPM either way, switch between straight, shuffle, and equal-triplet pulses, and mute the click if you’d rather watch than listen. Some lessons change tempo after a configured number of bars to demonstrate an accelerando.
• Form map — a row of named sections such as A–A–B–A. Repeated sections share a colour, and Previous/Next lets you follow the form as you listen.
• Rhythm pattern — a strip of counted subdivisions. Dark cells are rests, accented cells carry a > mark, and Previous/Next lets you trace exactly where an attack or silence falls.
• Phrase looper — an A-to-B strip of short tab or practice cues. Start it to watch the active cell repeat at the displayed tempo, adjust that tempo in 5 BPM steps, or move through the phrase by hand. It marks practice time; the lesson’s playable drill supplies the sound.

When a page shows a metronome and a grid together, starting the metronome walks the highlight through the form — one bar per bar, in the feel you picked. That pairing is the whole point of lessons like Counting the Bars and The Turnaround: you hear where you are and see where you are at the same time.

Core units and electives

The curriculum runs to a hundred lessons across seventeen units. Units 1 to 6 are the numbered core course, taken in order; three more — Rhythm lab, Applied positions and Ear training — continue it without numbers, and gate the same way. Everything else is an elective.

An elective is exactly what it sounds like: worth your time, never in your way. It can have prerequisites of its own, but it never counts toward a unit’s gate and never holds up the required course. You can spot one on the tree without reading anything — the branch leading to it is dotted and a different colour, and the lesson carries a small badge. It’s a hue, not a dimming, because dimming already means locked and an elective is perfectly playable.

Eight units are electives end to end. Their unit nodes take the same colour, and their number counts your progress through them (“2/6”) rather than a threshold, because there’s nothing to unlock. They still sit behind the units before them in the course, and read as locked until you get there.

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 four 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, leave real space by playing two bars and resting two, and handle a quick change — where the IV chord arrives in bar 2 instead of bar 5. They all use the same “Finish Lesson” pause-menu flow as Unit 2’s improvisation lesson, and the two that change the form put a 12-bar grid and a metronome on the page so you can hear it before you play over it.

Unit 4 — Scales and Improvisation

The major scale, the minor pentatonic and the country scale as playable drills, then the major and minor pentatonic again as open jams where what’s scored is how much of your playing stayed inside them. The unit closes on the circle of fifths: an instructional page with the diagram on it — rotate it to any harp key and see which position lands you in which key — followed by a jam that calls out a new position every few bars, so you play that relationship instead of just reading it.

Unit 5 — Jazz

Swing eighths, the ii-V-I outlined in chord tones, and the jazz blues form — the 12 bars with the substitutions that turn a blues into a standard, with a grid and metronome on the page to hear the difference. One elective introduces the chromatic harmonica’s slide button.

Unit 6 — Finding Your Way Around

Knowing the layout without hunting for it. Landmarks on holes 1, 4, 7 and 10; the middle, low and high registers on their own; clean jumps between holes; the two awkward crossings every diatonic player meets (3-to-4 and 6-to-7, where the breath pattern changes direction); and finally leaping across registers in one phrase.

Rhythm lab, Applied positions, Ear training

Three more gated units continue the course past Unit 6:

• Rhythm lab — eighth-note triplets, straight against shuffle with a metronome you can flip between the two, syncopation and rests, sixteenth-note articulation, and holding a tempo without drifting.
• Applied positions — landing notes for 1st, 2nd and 3rd position, each with a circle of fifths showing just that position.
• Ear training — four lessons that hide the scrolling notes. You hear a note, a shape (up, down or the same), or a whole phrase, and play it back. See the note on these below.

The elective units

The rest of the tree is optional. Nothing here gates anything, so take what you need:

• Advanced electives — high blow bends on holes 8–10, overblows and overdraws: the notes a diatonic harmonica isn’t supposed to have.
• Tongue-block electives — slap, pull, side pull, rake, flutter and moving octaves. Mostly instructional: the microphone can’t tell a tongue-blocked note from a puckered one, so these are explained and marked done rather than scored.
• Ornaments — the slow warble, the fast shake, trill cells and glissandi.
• Expression — hand, throat and diaphragm vibrato, controlling vibrato rate, crescendo and diminuendo, and long-tone control.
• Accompaniment — playing behind somebody: chord rhythm, staying out of a singer’s way, fills between lines, and trading fours.
• Chromatic harmonica — button coordination, choosing between enharmonic slide fingerings, chromatic fragments, legato phrasing across the slide, and an original jazz study, Crossing Lights.
• Musicianship — intervals, building chords, guide tones, arpeggio into scale, transposition (with a circle of fifths to work it out on), and listening for form.
• Practice skills — how to practise rather than what: slow practice, isolating a loop, spaced review, recording yourself, and mixed review.

Ear-training lessons hide the notes

The ear-training unit runs on the ordinary gameplay screen with the falling-note prompts turned off. The call still plays, scoring still works exactly as it does everywhere else, and the HUD still tells you how you did — you just have to find the note by ear instead of reading it off the highway. If a run feels broken because nothing is scrolling, that’s this, working as intended.