Real recorded xylophone notes on a piano keyboard: click, touch or type, and the xylophone answers. The xylophone is the tuned percussion instrument with the driest, most percussive sound. Free, nothing to install, with note names, your computer keyboard and a metronome.
Recorded notes, the xylophone's own range, and the keyboard you already know.
Every key plays a recording of a real xylophone: 8 notes from G4 to C8, each key pitched from the nearest one. The xylophone is tuned percussion instrument: wooden bars, usually rosewood, struck with hard mallets; tubes under the bars resonate and make the short, bright note ring a little longer.
The keyboard covers F4 to C8, where the recordings sound natural; a real xylophone plays about F4 to C8, written an octave lower. Use the octave arrows to move, and More keys on a wide screen.
Play quick repeated notes and fast scales in the top half of the keyboard: a xylophone note is short, so rhythm is everything. The note rings after you let go, like a plucked or struck instrument.
Famous xylophone music: Saint-Saëns, Danse macabre; Saint-Saëns, The Carnival of the Animals: Fossils; Ragtime xylophone solos of the 1920s. Pick out a melody by ear on the keyboard above.
Click or touch a key. The first note starts the sound; the xylophone recordings for the visible keys load in the background.
A S D F G H J K L play the white keys, W E T Y U O P the black ones (Q and Z on AZERTY). Z and X move an octave (W and X on AZERTY).
Set Labels to C D E or Do Ré Mi to see every note name, or to Keys to see your own keyboard letters.
Turn on the metronome and play along. Then try the same melody on the harp or the piano.
| Type | Sampled xylophone, playable on this page, free |
|---|---|
| Family | Percussion - tuned percussion instrument |
| Samples | 8 recorded notes, G4 to C8 |
| Range here | F4 to C8 |
| Real range | about F4 to C8, written an octave lower |
| Notation | Treble clef |
| Controls | A sustain pedal, labels, octave arrows, More keys and a metronome |
| Computer keyboard | Ableton layout by key position - QWERTY, AZERTY, QWERTZ |
| Credits | Xylophone samples from tonejs-instruments by Nicholas Brosowsky, CC BY 3.0 - see credits |
| Requirements | Any modern browser with Web Audio - Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari |
Most online instruments are a synthesiser with a picture on top. This one plays recordings of a real xylophone, so the attack, the tone and the decay are the instrument's own. The xylophone is the tuned percussion instrument with the driest, most percussive sound.
Xylophones come from Africa and South-East Asia, where wooden bar instruments have been played for centuries. Saint-Saëns brought the xylophone into the orchestra in 1874 to rattle the skeletons' bones in his Danse macabre.
A real xylophone is written in treble clef. The keyboard here plays the sounding notes, so a melody you find by ear is the melody you hear. To go further, the free sheet music and chord pages work with any instrument you can read music on.
Yes. Every key plays a recording of a real xylophone - 8 notes from G4 to C8 - pitched to the nearest key. The recordings come from the tonejs-instruments library, under a Creative Commons licence.
Yes. The middle row of letters plays the white keys and the row above it the black keys, by key position, so it works the same on QWERTY, AZERTY and QWERTZ keyboards. Set Labels to Keys to see the letters on the keys.
A xylophone plays about F4 to C8, written an octave lower. On this page the keyboard goes from F4 to C8, where the recordings sound natural.
Saint-Saëns, Danse macabre; Saint-Saëns, The Carnival of the Animals: Fossils; Ragtime xylophone solos of the 1920s.
Yes, free with no account and nothing to install. It runs in any modern browser, on a computer, a tablet or a phone.
The xylophone on this page is free, with no account. GOONS Studio adds a sampled piano, drum machines, synths and a sequencer in the browser - free for 7 days, no card required.
Free on this page, no account. Play the harp →