Deskestra
Instruments in your menu bar
Only for Mac
Free
Mac
Seven instruments that float over your work: piano, drums, bass, guitar, kalimba, metronome and a chromatic tuner. Brush the cursor across the guitar and it strums.
Deskestra is a set of small instruments that live in your Mac's menu bar. Click the icon and a compact
piano floats over whatever you were doing. Click it again and it's gone. There is no project to open,
nothing to save, and no dock icon.
Seven instruments, all played from the keyboard you are already typing on:
PIANO — Seventeen white keys with their sharps, C3 up to E5, fully polyphonic, and an octave shift
reaching from C0 to C8. Five voices, from grand to Rhodes to harpsichord. Free.
DRUMS — A kit seen from above, with twelve pieces in one tight cluster your hands never have to leave.
Pairs stack in a column — the kick on two keys, the snare's two voices, the hat's open and closed — so
switching within a pair is a finger dropping a row. 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.
BASS — 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. Finger, pick, upright, fretless or slap.
GUITAR — Fourteen chords, majors on the top row and minors below, and six strings you strum by moving the
mouse across them — no click needed, and it works even when Deskestra isn't the app you're working in.
Clean, jazz, steel, nylon or overdriven.
KALIMBA — 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, so each key sits where its tine does. Also marimba, vibraphone, music box and glockenspiel.
METRONOME — 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,
one to eight beats per bar, three click sounds. Free.
TUNER — Chromatic, accurate to a couple of cents, with a needle that moves at sixty 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. Free.
BUILT TO STAY OUT OF THE WAY
• No dock icon — it lives in the menu bar
• Always on top if you want it, and draggable anywhere
• Plays without stealing focus from the app you're in
• Light and dark, following your system
• Any keyboard layout — instruments follow the physical keys and show the letters yours prints
• Opens at login
• About two megabytes, because it plays the General MIDI bank macOS already ships instead of bundling a
sample library
PRIVACY
Deskestra collects nothing. There is no account, no analytics, and no server of ours anywhere. The app
sends nothing over the network at all. The tuner uses the microphone only while the tuner itself is on screen, and that
audio is measured for pitch and immediately discarded — never recorded, never stored, never sent anywhere.
PRICE
Free. All seven instruments are included — piano, drums, bass, guitar, kalimba, metronome and tuner.
No purchase, no subscription, no trial timer, nothing expires.
Requires macOS 13 or later. Apple silicon and Intel.
Ratings & Reviews
- This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
The developer, MAHMUT SAFA BULAT, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- MAHMUT SAFA BULAT
- Size
- 8.3 MB
- Category
- Music
- Compatibility
Requires macOS 13.0 or later.
- Mac
Requires macOS 13.0 or later.
- Mac
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- Copyright
- © 2026 Safa Bulat