Instrument to draw
Draw a random musical instrument with its family - or a whole unlikely band.
Runs locally in your browser. Nothing you generate is ever sent to a server.
Press "Generate Instrument" to see a result here.
Family
Press Generate and a musical instrument comes up with the family it belongs to. The list covers the orchestra and the rock band, and reaches past both to instruments like the koto, the cajon and the shakuhachi.
Instruments are grouped by how they make sound rather than by the music they play: keyboards, strings, wind, brass and percussion. That grouping is the one taught in schools and the one that explains why a saxophone is a wind instrument despite being made of brass - it is the reed that makes the sound, not the metal.
Most people pick an instrument from the small handful they have watched someone play. Drawing at random is a blunt way of widening that, and the answer is often more practical than it sounds: a ukulele or a melodica costs less than a month of streaming and is playable in a week.
Set the quantity to four or five and you get a band that nobody would have assembled deliberately. Writing for an unlikely lineup is a real composition exercise - the constraint forces arrangement decisions that a familiar setup lets you avoid.
The list is filtered to the family you chose, then an instrument is drawn using your browser's cryptographic random source with rejection sampling, so nothing is favoured. Batches without repeats use a Fisher-Yates shuffle driven by the same source.
Press Generate and one comes up with its family. Press again for another.
Yes. The filter covers keyboard, string, wind, brass and percussion instruments.
As a starting point. Most people choose from the four instruments they have seen up close, and a random draw is a quick way to hear about the rest.
Yes. Sitar, koto, djembe, tabla, didgeridoo and shakuhachi sit alongside the orchestral instruments.
Yes. Set the quantity to four or five with No repeats on and you get an unlikely lineup, which is a good composition exercise.
Yes. Each instrument is drawn with your browser's cryptographic random source, so every instrument in the chosen family has an equal chance.