About this site
About Online Guzheng
A free 21-string guzheng that runs entirely in your browser โ for people who want to hear the instrument, learn where the notes are, and practise jianpu without owning one yet.
What this is
Online Guzheng is a playable model of a 21-string guzheng (ๅค็ญ), the Chinese zither. It is tuned to the standard D pentatonic layout โ D, E, Fโฏ, A, B repeating over four octaves โ and it responds to mouse, touch and keyboard. You can pluck freely, sweep a glissando, roll a tremolo and press-bend any string up to the next tone of the scale.
On top of that sits a practice tool. Load a jianpu sheet as JSON and the app will show a live tracker, cue the notes at a tempo you choose, wait for you note by note in Own pace, loop any AโB section, and play a YouTube backing track in time with you. There is also an editor for writing sheets from scratch and exporting them.
What it is not
It is not a substitute for a real guzheng or a teacher. Nothing on a screen can teach you nail attachment, right-hand shape, arm weight, posture, or how a string actually feels under a press. What it can do is make the note layout, the jianpu numbering and the shape of each technique familiar โ so that time on a physical instrument is spent on the parts a browser cannot reach.
The lessons are written with that limit in mind: they teach reading, layout and listening, and they say plainly where a teacher has to take over.
How it works
- Sound. Every note is synthesised live with the Web Audio API โ no recorded samples to download, so the page loads fast and the pitch can bend continuously.
- Rendering. The soundboard is a single canvas, redrawn each frame, with a reduced-motion mode for people who prefer less movement.
- Sheets. Sheet music is plain JSON, documented on the sheet format page. Files are parsed in your browser.
- Offline-friendly. Once loaded, playing needs no network. Only the YouTube backing track does.
Your data
- There is no account, no sign-up and no payment.
- Sheets you upload or write are never sent anywhere. They are parsed in the page and kept in your browser's local storage so they are still there next time. Removing the sheet deletes it.
- The site uses privacy-standard analytics (Google Analytics and Vercel Analytics) to count visits and see which features get used โ for example how many people play a note at all. No sheet contents, and nothing that identifies you personally, is recorded.
Copyright policy
This site hosts no third-party sheet music, and it never will. Sheet music, arrangements and editions are copyrighted works, and a numbered-notation transcription of a protected song is still a derivative of it.
- Everything bundled here โ the warm-up demo and every exercise in the lessons โ is original material written for this site, free for you to use and adapt.
- Lessons teach technique using original drills. We will not add a lesson built around a copyrighted piece, however popular it is.
- When you upload a sheet, it stays in your browser. Please only convert music you wrote, music you are licensed to use, or traditional and public-domain works.
If you believe something on this site infringes your rights, get in touch and it will be removed while the claim is reviewed.
Credits
Online Guzheng is built and maintained by Eric Pham Hoang. It is free to use, with no account and no payment. Suggestions, bug reports and corrections from players are very welcome โ especially from guzheng teachers and students who spot something that does not match the real instrument.
The sound engine is released separately as an open-source package, guzheng-sound on npm and on GitHub, so anyone can build their own guzheng with it.