Show HN: Guitoro, a virtual guitar you strum with your keyboard
- ID
- 35349
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 14 Oct 2026, 3:11 AM
- Fetched
- 14 Oct 2026, 9:59 PM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://guitoro.com/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 4.5
- Created
- 14 Oct 2026, 10:00 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_coders
What happened
Guitoro is a free browser-based virtual guitar (Show HN, 489 points / 129 comments) that you play with your keyboard: left hand holds one of 15 chords on letter keys while the right hand strums with H and J, plus arpeggios, single strings, chucks and palm mutes. It ships 4 instruments (steel-string acoustic, nylon/classic, electric, 4-string bass), 51 songs, 56 strum/picking patterns and 15 drum styles, plays along at speeds down to 20%, and every note is a recording of a real instrument with no download and no account. Touch and mouse are first-class too: chord pads plus up to five-finger swipes on mobile, and a fast mouse swipe plays louder while a slow drag rolls notes one by one.
Why it matters
There is no Malaysian or AI angle here, so treat this as a build reference rather than news: it is a working example of a zero-install, no-signup web app with genuine input parity across keyboard, touch and mouse, progressive AVIF image loading, and a sample-based audio engine. If you are shipping a browser tool for mobile-first users, the 129-comment thread is the useful part — read it for the concrete complaints about audio latency, sample licensing, and keyboard-layout choices before you copy this pattern into your own product.
Discussion angle
Keyboard-first input mapping: is 'left hand chords, right hand H/J strum' a design worth stealing for non-music apps, and what did the 129 HN comments say broke when they tried it on a phone?