About
The recorder is a serious instrument that wears its accessibility lightly. A child can play it; a master can spend a lifetime with it.
This is a free recorder curriculum, built for people who want to learn the instrument seriously without paying for lessons, downloading an app, or signing up for an account.Quality music education should be free and accessible. Most barriers to learning the recorder are not musical. Everything ships as plain HTML, JavaScript, and CSS over HTTPS, with no tracking and no third-party requests.
The site goes from your first long tone on B all the way through Telemann fantasias, with about ninety lessons spanning five levels. Notation transposes itself between soprano and alto recorders. Every exercise plays back so you can hear it before you try.
Pedagogy
The curriculum follows the established consensus of recorder method books rather than inventing its own sequence. Beginners learn the notes B, A, and G first — only the left hand — and progress through the chromatic range, articulation, and ornamentation, ending in Baroque sonata movements.
The pedagogical commitments are:
- One new concept per lesson.
- Mastery-based progression rather than time-based.
- Theory taught in musical context, not as separate drills.
- Historical awareness for Baroque and Renaissance repertoire.
The recommended sources are Hugh Orr’s Basic Recorder Technique, Mario Duschenes’s Method for the Recorder, and the historical treatises of Quantz, Hotteterre, and Ganassi.
How it’s built
The site is a static set of HTML files generated by a single Python script, served over a CDN. There is no backend. Music notation is rendered in the browser by VexFlow; audio playback uses Tone.js. Both are vendored locally so the site works fully offline once you’ve visited it once.
Lesson progress and reading preferences live only in your browser’s local storage.
The curriculum at a glance
- Absolute beginner · weeks 1–12
- First notes; simple songs in the B·A·G range.
- Early beginner · months 3–6
- Completing the first octave; phrasing and musicality.
- Lower intermediate · months 6–12
- Key signatures, ornamentation, Renaissance music.
- Upper intermediate · years 1–2
- Articulation, Baroque style, complete sonata movements.
- Advanced · years 2+
- Major Baroque works and virtuoso technique.
Contact and contributing
This project is open source. Read the source, file an issue, or send a patch on GitHub; for general questions, write to [email protected].