// what it does and why
A browser instrument: sixteen glowing pads, all tuned to one scale, so nothing you press can sound wrong. It makes a sound on the first tap. Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for, nothing to read first.
Open it →Tap a pad, or use the keyboard: 1 to 8 is the lower half, Q to I the upper half. Pitch climbs left to right and top to bottom, across exactly three octaves. Each row of four has its own colour, which is how you learn the layout without reading the labels.
Two switches sit above the grid. Drone puts a low sustained tone under everything, Echo repeats what you play, and both are simply on or off. A wall of knobs is what makes people close the tab.
Every note rings a little over two seconds and fades by itself, so four pads in a row leaves you holding a chord rather than four separate sounds. That overlap is the instrument: the playing is in the timing, not the choice of notes.
All sixteen pads come from a five note scale, repeated up the range. Scales like this have no half step clashes inside them, so any two pads sound fine together, in any order, at any speed. There is no wrong one to hit.
That limit is the point. It removes the part of playing an instrument where you can be visibly bad at it, which is what stops most people ever touching one. The cost is real: no key change, no retuning, nothing outside those five notes. It is for drifting, not for writing a tune.
I wanted something that makes a good noise within a second of loading. Browser synths are usually a toy with four notes you are done with in ten seconds, or a studio in a tab that wants a project and a sample pack before it makes any sound. This sits in the gap, and it is the tool here I open most when I am not working.
There are no recordings behind the pads. Every sound is generated in the moment you press it, by the browser's own audio engine, with no library doing the work. Each pad is two tones stacked: a plain one at the note itself, and a brighter one an octave above set a hair sharp of a true octave, so the pair drifts against itself instead of locking into one flat, dead tone.
Nothing to wait for on a phone connection, and no sound in here that anybody else owns.
The drone is three tones at the root of the scale, two of them a fraction of a cycle apart in pitch. That tiny gap makes it swell and sink about once every two seconds, which is the difference between a drone and a test tone. It sits far under the pads, because it is a floor, not a part.
The echo is one delay line at just under four tenths of a second, fed back at under half volume, so a hit returns about five times before it fades out. Switching echo off stops new notes entering it, but whatever is already circling in there rings out to the end. Cutting a tail dead sounds worse than letting it finish.