Key-J

Every keystroke plays a note, in any application.

What it does

Your keyboard becomes an instrument. Every keystroke plays a note, the notes land on a staff as you go, and the session exports as a WAV. With global capture on it hears your keys in any application.

Tablature import

Paste guitar tablature, choose a tuning, and Key-J converts the frets to notes. Sequence mode then plays that run one note per keystroke, so the pitches are handled and what is left to you is timing and feel.

Eight tunings including drop D, Eb, DADGAD, seven-string and bass, with a capo offset. Hammer-ons, slides and bends are read as the notes they land on. A block with the wrong number of strings produces no notes and says how many it found, rather than guessing a tuning silently.

The keyboard

An on-screen keyboard shows which computer key plays which note, printed on the key it triggers, so a wrong binding is visible rather than something you find by ear. Keys light as they sound, from a keystroke or from a sequence.

Turn Build on and click keys to enter a run without typing a single note name - which is the part that made entering a sequence miserable.

Also

Seven tone presets from clean guitar to shred. MIDI import. Six play styles, four waveforms, remappable keys and scale switching.

On the command line

Once a song is in, the workbench is in the way. pip install keyj gives you the same converter and the same player without the window.

pip install keyj
keyj tab solo.txt -o song.txt    tablature in, note names out
keyj render song.txt out.wav     the sequence, at a tempo
keyj show song.txt               what is in a sequence
keyj play song.txt               any keystroke plays the next note

tab, render and show are standard library only and never touch your keyboard. play is the one part that needs a global hook, so it is a separate install: pip install "keyj[play]". It runs in the foreground and stops when you stop it — nothing is added to startup.

It never learns which key you pressed. In sequence mode any key advances, so the player asks whether a key went down and discards everything else. There is no keystroke buffer in it, which is the difference between an instrument and a keylogger.

The CLI is MIT. The desktop and browser apps are not — see the licence.