Channel 01 / Sequencer
The booth
Phrase in. Sixteen steps out. Flip pads, bend the scale, swap the voice, and keep the volume where your neighbours still like you.
When stopped, the display draws the pitch contour of the sixteen steps. While playing, it shows a live waveform and spectrum of the synth. With reduced motion on, it stays a still picture of the pattern.
Reduced motion is on, so the display and meters hold still. The step marker still advances and the audio is unchanged.
Silent until you press Play. Starts quiet.
Starts at 30 of 100. Meters read the synth before the volume fader.
Sixteen steps
Pads follow your phrase. Flip any pad to take over.
Select a pad to see its note.
How the booth works
Short version: type, press play, poke at things. Longer version below, including the assumptions and the corners where the studio politely refuses.
Five moves
- Drop a phrase. Type it and press Enter or Drop it. Sixteen pads light up, each showing a note name.
- Press Play. The first press wakes the audio engine. Browsers only allow that after a tap or click, which is why nothing ever autoplays.
- Flip pads. A filled pad sounds, a dashed one is a rest. Select a pad and use the pitch buttons to move it up or down the scale.
- Change the key. An untouched pattern rebuilds in the new scale. A hand-edited one keeps your edits and snaps each pitch to the nearest available degree.
- Reset or clear. Reset rebuilds the melody from the phrase. Clear mutes all sixteen pads so you can build from nothing.
Keyboard
- Tab
- Moves between controls. The pad grid is one stop.
- ← →
- Move between pads. ↑ ↓ jump a row.
- Space Enter
- Toggle the focused pad.
- Shift+↑/↓
- Raise or lower the pad's pitch.
- Home End
- First or last pad.
- P
- Play or stop, while focus is inside the console.
- M
- Mute or unmute, while focus is inside the console.
- Knobs, fader
- Arrow keys nudge, PgUp PgDn jump, Home End go to the ends.
Assumptions
- Case and extra spaces do not matter. Punctuation and accents do, so "cafe" and "café" are different songs.
- The hash is FNV-1a, chosen because it is small and steady. It is not a security tool. Do not treat a melody as a way to hide anything.
- Pitches run two octaves from the root, starting near the middle of the keyboard. Notes are tuned to equal temperament with A4 at 440 Hz.
- Echo is a dotted-eighth delay, so it follows your tempo and lands between the beats.
Edge cases
- Empty phrase: the studio keeps your current melody and tells you to type something.
- Long phrase: capped at 120 characters. The cap is a courtesy to the layout, not a limit of the hash.
- All pads off: playback runs in silence and the status line says so.
- No Web Audio: the sequencer and display still work, just without sound.
- Loud zone: above 70 the first press of Play only warns you. Press again to confirm. Volume is never saved between visits.
- Background tab: playback stops, because browsers slow timers in hidden tabs and the notes would stutter.
- Phone silent switch: on some phones it also silences web audio. Check it if the meters move but nothing plays.
- Reduced motion: meters and the display hold still. The step marker still advances and the audio is unchanged.