Everything you need to know about playing Strimano.
Strimano is a browser-based air synth. Wave your hands to play music — no downloads, no hardware. It uses your webcam and hand tracking to turn finger movements into music in real time. Each extended finger plays a note based on its height. Both hands play simultaneously for up to 10 voices.
No downloads, no hardware, no signup. Just open the URL, allow your camera, and wave your hands.
Each finger you extend plays a note. Higher hand position = higher pitch. Curl a finger to stop its note.
Strimano works on any device with a camera and a modern browser:
Chrome tends to give the best performance for hand tracking. A device with a dedicated GPU (like Apple Silicon Macs) will be smoother.
No. All hand and face tracking runs entirely in your browser using MediaPipe. No video ever leaves your device. The camera feed is processed locally and never uploaded.
Each extended finger independently plays a note from the selected scale. The note is determined by the fingertip's vertical position on screen:
Both hands are tracked simultaneously, giving you up to 10 independent voices (5 fingers per hand). Curl a finger to silence it.
Over 30 scales, switchable with the dropdown in the camera controls:
8 built-in presets, selectable from the voice dropdown:
Moving your hand left and right sweeps the synth's filter cutoff frequency:
This works like the X-axis on a Kaoss pad or the wrist tilt on a Bebot.
Yes. In the camera control bar:
A smaller range (1-2 octaves) gives you finer pitch control. A larger range (5-7) lets you sweep across a wider pitch range with the same hand movement.
You'll see a subtle face mesh drawn over your face on the canvas. Face tracking runs alongside hand tracking.
Latch holds notes after you release them. When latch is on:
Activate with the Latch button or a left wink (if face tracking is on).
The Arpeggiator automatically cycles through your held notes in a rhythmic pattern instead of playing them all at once.
When arp is on, extending fingers doesn't play notes directly — the arp timer steps through the notes one at a time.
Patterns:
Activate with the Arp button or a right wink.
Yes. Latch + Arp is powerful: latch notes to build a chord, then enable arp to hear them cycle as an arpeggio. You can keep adding notes with your fingers while the arp runs.
When the arp is enabled, you'll see:
For example, 120 BPM at 1/8 = 4 steps per second. At 1/16 = 8 steps per second.
Yes. Strimano listens for MIDI clock on any connected MIDI input. When it detects clock pulses from your DAW, the arpeggiator locks to that tempo automatically.
The BPM display updates in real time to show your DAW's tempo, and a green EXT label appears to confirm external sync.
Step 1: Create a virtual MIDI port
Step 2: Send clock from your DAW
Logic Pro:
Ableton Live:
Step 3: In Strimano
Yes. Select a MIDI output from the dropdown in the top bar. Strimano will send:
This lets you control any synth, sampler, or effect in your DAW with hand and face gestures.
Strimano and MidiDeck are companion products. Strimano is the gesture instrument; MidiDeck is the hardware controller platform.
If you want to combine gesture control with hardware MIDI controllers, run both in separate browser tabs. Both can output MIDI to the same DAW via the IAC Driver.
The recording captures the camera view (with hand skeleton overlay) and the synthesizer audio together as a video file.
Yes. The audio input dropdown next to the transport buttons lets you select an external audio source. This is useful for capturing audio routed through a virtual audio device like BlackHole (Mac).
The Piano View (strimano.com/piano) is an air piano mode where a 2-octave visual keyboard is displayed at the bottom of the screen. Instead of using finger height to control pitch (like the Air Synth view), you curl your fingers to tap virtual keys.
Your finger's horizontal position on camera determines which key you're targeting. Curl a finger down to play the note, extend it to release.
Colored dots show where each finger is targeting on the keyboard. Moving your hand left or right changes which keys your fingers are over.
Piano mode gives you a fixed 2-octave chromatic keyboard, while the Air Synth gives you a scalable range across any scale.
The Sensitivity slider adjusts how much finger curl is needed to trigger a note. Different hand sizes and distances from the camera may need different settings:
Start at the default (middle) and adjust if notes are triggering too easily or not easily enough.
Yes. The Root dropdown in the top bar shifts the 2-octave window. Options are C2, C3 (default), C4, and C5. This changes which 24 notes are available on the keyboard.
Yes. The recording transport in the top bar works the same as in Air Synth mode. Click the red circle to record, the square to stop. The recording captures camera video with hand tracking overlay and synth audio together.
Strimano has a built-in safety sweep that releases orphaned notes after 2 seconds of no hand detection. If a note gets stuck: