ClefPulse

Online instrument · No account needed

Play the xylophone online

Strike ten wooden bars with a mouse, a finger or the number row. Change the root note or the scale and the bars retune straight away, without a reload and without an account.

Xylophone bars

Scroll or swipe sideways for the remaining bars

How do you play this online xylophone?

Strike a bar and it sounds. Nothing is installed, nothing is uploaded, and every note is built by your own browser rather than streamed from a server.

  1. Click, tap or hold a bar. Several bars sound at once, so chords and rolls work as they do on the real instrument.
  2. Use the number row: 1 to 0 play the ten leftmost bars from left to right.
  3. Set the root note, the scale and the bar colour above the bars. The layout retunes while you play.

Why does a xylophone sound short and woody?

Its bars are wood, and they are thicker and narrower than a marimba's, so each strike gives a hard attack that dies away within a fraction of a second.

A xylophone bar is undercut on its underside, which pulls the first overtone into line with a harmonic of the fundamental instead of the inharmonic ring a plain bar gives. The tubes below the bars are tuned to that fundamental and reinforce it.

Which scale should you start with?

Pentatonic. Its five notes leave out the two steps that clash hardest, so any bar you strike fits with any other and improvising is immediately rewarding.

Major and minor lay out the full seven notes across ten bars, and chromatic gives all thirteen semitones with both spellings printed on the bars that carry two names.

Xylophone or glockenspiel?

Choose the xylophone for a dry percussive line that stops when you stop. Choose the glockenspiel when you want a bright metal ring that hangs in the air. Same controls, different bars, and a register an octave apart.

Play the glockenspiel

Xylophone questions

Is this online xylophone free?

Yes. Every bar, root note and scale is free and no account is needed. Nothing you play is recorded or sent anywhere.

Can I play the xylophone with my computer keyboard?

Yes. The number row plays the bars from left to right, with 1 on the leftmost bar and 0 on the tenth. Hold several keys to sound several bars together. In the chromatic layout the bars past the tenth are played with the pointer or with keyboard focus.

Why is there no sound until I strike a bar?

Browsers start audio only after someone interacts with the page. The first strike wakes the sound engine, and every strike after it sounds immediately.

How many bars does it have?

Ten bars for major, minor and pentatonic, and thirteen for chromatic, which covers a full octave of semitones from the root.

Does it work on a phone?

Yes. The bars respond to touch, several fingers work at once, and the row scrolls sideways when a layout is wider than the screen.

Which sources support this page?

The acoustic and orchestration claims above come from the published references below rather than from memory. The wording is original to ClefPulse, and every note you hear is generated on your own device.

Published and reviewed by ToolForge.

Content reviewed on .