Playing a Song

Play → Play Song starts the scored song flow:

1. Select Mode — choose Play 2D (a scrolling note highway) or Play 3D (a 3D harmonica model you play along with). Both modes share the same scoring, timing, and pause menu — it’s purely a visual choice.
2. Select Artist, then Select Song — browse the bundled songs (and anything you’ve dropped into ~/Harmonicon/songs/, see Getting Started).
3. A 3-2-1 countdown plays, showing the song title, key, and which physical harmonica to grab, then the chart starts scrolling and the backing track plays.

Scoring

As notes reach the hit line, Harmonicon compares the pitch it hears against what the chart expects, at that instant:

• Perfect / Good hits, based on how close your timing was to the note’s onset.
• Miss, if the window passes with nothing (or the wrong pitch) played.
• Longer notes reward holding the correct pitch for their full duration, not just landing the onset.
• Special techniques — bends, vibrato, wah, overblow/ overdraw, and (chromatic only) slides — are validated on their own terms, not just “was some pitch playing”: a bend note checks you actually bent to the target pitch, a vibrato/wah note checks the oscillation rate you played matches what the chart asks for.
• Chords and octave-split notes only score when every note in the group sounds together — playing the same holes correctly but one at a time doesn’t count.

A combo multiplier builds on consecutive hits and resets on a miss. The Results screen after each song breaks your accuracy down by technique (not just an overall percentage), so you can see at a glance whether it was your bends or your timing that need work.

Pausing and quitting

Press Esc, or click the ⏸ button in the bottom-right corner, to pause mid-song — the on-screen button works the same as Esc, no keyboard required. The pause menu is two columns: Resume / Restart / Quit Song on the left, every practice aid on the right, so a slip of the mouse over one can’t misclick the other. The practice aids:

• Wait for Note — freezes the highway and music the instant an unhit note reaches the hit line, and holds there until you play it — useful for slowing down a hard passage without losing your place. There’s no way to “miss” a frozen note; it just waits.
• Practice Speed — a slider from 50% to 100% that slows the highway and metronome without pitch-shifting the audio; it mutes instead below 100%, so you never hear a chipmunked backing track.
• Adaptive Difficulty — off by default (turn it on in Options, under Audio); once on, a song’s notes unlock gradually as you clear each phrase cleanly, instead of throwing the full chart at you immediately. This is one setting shared by every song, not something you pick per song. To override a specific phrase, click its rectangle on the song-progress bar’s bottom strip (it highlights gold once selected) and drag the Learned slider that appears below — or flip the pause menu’s own toggle to switch it off/on immediately, mid-song (this also updates the Options-menu setting).
• A–B Looping — drag on the song-progress bar at the top of the screen to mark a section and loop it, for drilling one phrase repeatedly. Clear Loop removes it.

See the Controls Reference for every in-game keybinding.