A piano, a drum kit, a bass, a guitar, a kalimba, a metronome and a tuner — floating on your desktop, one click away, gone when you're done. No dock icon. No project to open. Nothing to save.
Free · macOS 13 or later · about 2 MB
The party trick
No click. No focus. Brush the pointer over the guitar and it strums — even when Deskestra isn't the app you're working in. Pick a chord with one key, then let your hand drift across the strings on the way to something else.
Seven of them
No MIDI controller, no setup, no sample library to download — Deskestra uses the General MIDI bank macOS already ships with.
Seventeen white keys with their sharps — C3 up to E5 — fully polyphonic, with an octave shift that reaches from C0 to C8. Five voices, from grand to Rhodes to harpsichord.
the top row, then the whole bottom row · sharps on the row above each
Twelve pieces in one tight cluster your hands never have to leave, with each pair stacked in a column — kick above kick, the snare's two voices, the hat's two. Every piece is placed in the stereo field where you can see it, so the crash on the left arrives on the left. Four kits, including a TR-808.
FV kick · G snare · N hi-hat · RTY toms
Four strings, open plus eight frets, and one note per string at a time — like a real one. Each row of your keyboard is a string, nine keys long. Finger, pick, upright, fretless or slap.
number row = G · top row = D · home row = A · bottom row = E
Fourteen chords — seven majors on the top row, seven minors below — and six strings you strum by moving the mouse. Clean, jazz, steel, nylon or overdriven.
Q…U C to B major · A…J minor
The one for people who don't play an instrument. Fifteen tines, two octaves of plain C major, so there is no wrong note to hit — brush the cursor across them and whatever comes out is music. Laid out like a real one, lowest note in the middle and the scale fanning outward, with the keys fanning out from the middle too. Also marimba, vibraphone, music box and glockenspiel.
two keys for the centre tine · the top row fans left, the bottom row fans right
The click is placed sample by sample inside the audio engine, so it cannot drift — and the pendulum is driven by that same clock, so it swings exactly on the beat rather than near it. Tap tempo, 1–8 beats per bar, three click sounds.
Space start · T tap tempo · ←→ tempo
Chromatic, accurate to a couple of cents, with a needle that moves at 60 frames a second so closing in on a string feels smooth instead of twitchy. Green in tune, orange close, red off. Reference pitch anywhere from 432 to 446 Hz.
note name · hertz · cents · input level
A desk toy, not an app
Deskestra lives in the menu bar. Click the icon to show or hide it; it never joins your app switcher.
Keep it floating over your editor, or let it fall behind like any other window. Drag it anywhere by its grip.
You don't have to click into it first. Hover-strum the guitar while your text cursor stays exactly where it was.
Follows your system, or pin it to one. The frame is real vibrancy, so it picks up whatever is behind it.
Instruments follow the physical keys, and each one shows the letter your own keyboard prints on it. Turkish Q, AZERTY and QWERTZ all play the same.
One switch. It's there every morning, taking up eighteen pixels.
No bundled sample library. Deskestra plays the General MIDI bank macOS already has, so there is nothing to download.
Price
Every instrument, every voice, no purchase anywhere in the app.
No in-app purchases, no subscription, no trial timer, no account, and no ads.
Questions
No. Every instrument works offline, forever. The only moment a connection is needed is buying or restoring an instrument, and that is handled by Apple's App Store rather than by us.
No. Every instrument plays the General MIDI bank that ships with macOS, which is why the app is about two megabytes instead of several hundred.
It does essentially nothing until you play something. The tuner is the only part that works continuously, and only while it's the instrument on screen.
Yes — that's rather the point. The window doesn't steal focus, and the guitar strums on hover without a click.
Because a desk toy you have to pay for before you know whether you like it isn't a desk toy. Play the piano, run the metronome, tune your guitar. The drums are right there too, and so is everything else.
No. Recording starts when you open the tuner and stops when you leave it. Nothing is recorded or transmitted at any point — see the privacy policy.
Yes. Every instrument is mapped to physical keys rather than to letters, and the letter drawn on each key, tine or drum is the one your own layout prints there — so the fingering is identical on a US, Turkish, French or German keyboard.
macOS 13 Ventura or later, on both Apple silicon and Intel.