Before you start

Why an account matters

Without an account, your work lasts as long as the tab. A refresh brings your pads and audio back, but closing the tab loses them.

With an account, your work is kept:

• Saving a kit. Pads, colors, effects and chop lists are saved together, so you can open a sampler weeks later and find it as you left it.
• Keeping a beat. A pattern is temporary until you save it as a beat. Saved beats are stored with the kit they belong to.
• Moving between devices. Start on a laptop and continue on a phone. Your samplers and beats follow your account, not your browser.
• Publishing. A saved kit can have a public page under your username. The link opens the instrument with your kit loaded.

An account is free and needs only an email address.

If you are on a phone

Check the silent switch first. On an iPhone, the switch on the side of the phone mutes web audio in Safari. Pads light up and the visualizer moves, but you hear nothing. This is the most common reason the app seems broken on a phone, and the page cannot detect it or warn you.

On Android, silent mode usually does not affect media volume. If you hear nothing, check the media volume. The volume keys often adjust the ringer instead unless something is already playing.

Sampling

The half of the app where you put sound on pads and shape it. A sampler has four banks of sixteen pads.

• Three ways to fill a pad. Record from your microphone, upload a file, or hold a pad and let the app synthesize a sound. No sample pack is needed.
• Turning one recording into a kit. Chopping marks sections of a sample and puts each one on its own pad, by hand or sixteen at a time.
• Per-pad shaping. Volume, playback rate, pan, reverse, looping, and one-shot or gated playback. Each pad is set independently.
• Per-pad effects. Every pad has its own effects chain: EQ, filter, amp envelope, reverb, delay, chorus, distortion and lo-fi.

Sequencing

The half of the app where pads become a beat. Everything here works on the bank you are viewing.

• Two ways to write. Tap steps into the grid, or start the loop and play pads while it records. Both play as one pattern, so you can perform a part and then fix a single hit by hand.
• Record is its own off switch. The same button stops recording. Pads you play afterwards still sound but are not recorded, so you can try a part before you keep it.
• Feel and length. One to eight bars, 40 to 240 BPM, with tap tempo, swing, quantize and a metronome.
• Mixing while it plays. EQ, filter, drive, lo-fi, chorus, reverb and delay over everything you hear, turned while a beat loops and saved with the beat.
• Timing that holds. Notes are scheduled on the audio clock, so timing stays steady even when the browser is busy.