Out of my love for synthesizers and web development, I created a free audio sequencer called draw.audio, which includes selectable scales, waveforms, effects, LFOs, and more.
While there are other “tone matrix” style webapps out there, I couldn’t find one that quite scratched the itch for a large grid layout, modern design, and easily accessible modulation controls. So that was the inspiration, alongside my addiction to synths and hardware jam-boxes like the Synthstrom Deluge.
Draw.audio uses the Web Audio API without any other frameworks or libraries. I tried to keep it as lightweight as possible. The to-do list includes a tutorial, pattern preset browsing, more audio effects, light visual animations, and open-sourcing it.
In case you'd like tips:
• It’s more fun on touch screens, like an iPad.
• It's kid friendly! In my limited testing, kids enjoy drawing on it.
• The share button generates a direct link to anything you create.
A big thank you to Sheer Havoc for creating the logo and other graphics!
And thank you all for checking it out! I’d love to hear any feedback you have. <3
-Randy (long-time lurker, first time poster, and HN fan from SF)
This is really well done. I know from making https://ambiph.one that web audio can be really tricky. Lots of fiddly little inconsistencies and gotchas (mainly on iOS, in my experience). So building something that's this customisable, fun to use and runs solidly is a real achievement.
I've got vague plans to add generative music to Ambiphone and I've been using Ableton so far but I think this will be a really useful sketchpad for experimenting with sounds and patterns
Thanks! Yes getting Web Audio to play nice with iOS was tricky and it's still not perfect. I checked out Ambiph and it's fantastic! I love the clean UI and all of the customization options for soothing ambience. Well done.
Assuming you've pressed the yellow Start button (on the TR-808; it looks different on other sequencers), check if you're on silent mode. Some web audio is muted in silent mode on iOS
This is probably the use case you least expected to hear, but the first thing i thought of when playing with this is how useful it could be in helping make progress when learning jazz improvisation.
Typically when you're learning improv, you're figuring out what scales work with which chords in which parts of the harmony. Normally you'd start with something like 'xxx liked to use the half-whole diminished scale when leading into the I chord from the dominant', so you'd read that/listen to that bit of a solo, try to remember or look up the scale, practice it a bunch of times until you think you know the notes/fingerings, then try to use those notes in that part of your improvisation for that bar or two (while trying to not just play up and down the scale you just practiced playing up and down), until you eventually internalise the 'feel' of each of those notes in that scale in the context of that part of the harmony.
Of course nothing replaces practice, but that process can be quite offputting as you end up second-guessing a lot of your mistakes before your brain actually goes 'ahh that's what that's supposed to sound/feel like'. Conversely, the UX on this is so effortless that I just thought screw it, I'll try it for a couple of mins. I just drew some patterns, picked a transpose/tempo and hit play while I played the harmony part to something I was working through (spacebar mapping to play/stop/restart ftw, nice), and I ended up wrapping my head around it way quicker than I normally would, with a lot more energy left over. It made remembering/playing that scale by ear afterwards way easier too, was nice and quick to redraw the pattern to only include certain notes to focus on, etc.. Yeah, I probably didn't internalise as much of the muscle memory, but that's not always a terrible thing (stops you just playing up and down the scale), and the app also makes it super easy to save that context as a link in my obsidian notes so i can just come back to it whenever i want to pick up where I left off.
Honestly I was genuinely surprised by how well what you've made mapped to the use case. It kinda makes sense given how trad/bebop jazz improv is mostly just runs of notes of the same duration. Yeah ok it's probably not the only app for this, yeah it's probably not the best one, but it's the one that got me to do the thing I'd been putting off doing for ages, so I thought I'd share. Thank you for making it, really nicely done!
That's so cool! I'm glad it inspired you to accomplish what you have been putting off for ages. I do think an alternative and more visual/tactile experience can help some people approach music from a different prospective they might be accustomed to. There's definitely room for improvement. If you have any specific suggestions for your use case please let me know. Thanks for checking it out!
I had a think about it as I was writing that comment, and honestly, all I think you're missing is tap tempo. That's it. I thought that maybe the ability to set a different scale for each of the four different instruments would be cool, but I'm not sure that it wouldn't complicate the UX too much. Tap tempo, though, would be useful and I imagine fairly easy to implement.
My favorite use of this toy is making something for one scale, and changing the scale. I end up getting these unique ... I'll call them "harmonic textures" each time, even though they're using the same "note pixel" layout. Very intuitive way to experiment with music, and I guess you can make art with it too.
I'm not a fantastic artist, admittedly. And it doesn't help when you're trying to balance that with music! But this is supposed to be a grassy flower garden.
Nice work! You should tune the control sensitivities though, like with the filter cutoffs the usable range is concentrated in a few pixels on the left.
I guess synths usually use some kind of logarithmic scales?
Good observation! You're absolutely right. I need to make a few of the sliders non-linear/logarithmic. I wouldn't want to simply decrease the range of the lowpass filter for example and lose the subtle higher frequencies. Thanks for the input.
I tested both on Firefox and Chrome (on Linux).
One key point is that I set the zoom to 150%; when it's the case, the vertical size of the left panel changes when (un)folding, which changes the aspect ratio of the right panel.
I hope it was as fun to build as it is to play with.
Nit: I keep fat fingering the controls. Every 2 out of 3 times I touch a control, it collapsed the controls section instead.
Also - I thought the lines beneath the color controls were titles (> etc) and not buttons. I couldn’t figure out how someone shared a link where it played notes from left to right
Thanks for the input. I'm hoping a simple tutorial will help with finding the playback direction buttons. I'm not sure what to do about the fat-fingering problem. Maybe the controls could be bigger.
Is the "bounce back and forth mode" supposed to be inconsistent when bouncing off each edge? Bouncing one way appears to add an extra note, when the pattern is resetting.
Awesome work! I don't have knowledge on music but I like if something makes good sound without knowing the theory behind it, I like it.
It works seamlessly on an old beaten Android phone too. I tried recreating Minecraft music(like Taswell) but couldn't do it well. Wondering if it's at all possible on this.
I just listened to Taswell for the first time. Great track! About recreating the melody, I don't think it would be possible because draw.audio doesn't have variable note lengths currently. Maybe that would be a nice addition in the future. Thanks for checking it out!
The reason it sounds good is because you can't go outside the selected scale so all notes will automatically be in tune. It's like one of those handpans that sound amazing even if you just randomly hit it.
From this I learned that, contrary to what I believed, on iOS Safari, websites do boy in fact pause when you change tabs. I was really surprised!
Anyway, I used to do a lot of work in this kind of space, and you've encapsulated all the good parts down into a fantastic distilled pure essence. Wonderfully done!
This is great work and a really nice take on the concept. As someone else said, midi output would be really cool as this is a great just doodley scratchpad but once you have something great it'd be awesome to build on it.
It should just work if you start tapping notes or press play. Make sure the phone's sound toggle is not muted. I'm not sure of any other reason it wouldn't work. Are you using Safari?
Out of my love for synthesizers and web development, I created a free audio sequencer called draw.audio, which includes selectable scales, waveforms, effects, LFOs, and more.
While there are other “tone matrix” style webapps out there, I couldn’t find one that quite scratched the itch for a large grid layout, modern design, and easily accessible modulation controls. So that was the inspiration, alongside my addiction to synths and hardware jam-boxes like the Synthstrom Deluge.
Draw.audio uses the Web Audio API without any other frameworks or libraries. I tried to keep it as lightweight as possible. The to-do list includes a tutorial, pattern preset browsing, more audio effects, light visual animations, and open-sourcing it.
In case you'd like tips: • It’s more fun on touch screens, like an iPad. • It's kid friendly! In my limited testing, kids enjoy drawing on it. • The share button generates a direct link to anything you create.
A big thank you to Sheer Havoc for creating the logo and other graphics!
And thank you all for checking it out! I’d love to hear any feedback you have. <3
-Randy (long-time lurker, first time poster, and HN fan from SF)