willstepp

I was trying to come up with a fun and unique design for a side project, and ended up making this. It was inspired by Apple's Liquid Glass, but has unique properties of its own, allowing you to customize nearly everything about it: motion, tint, opacity, roundness, elevation, and more. If you have any interest, please give it a try and let me know what you think. MIT licensed.

Thanks!

To add some further details, the AM-1 is a performance arpeggiator.

It allows you to quickly get up and running with a three-part harmony, based on a chosen key/scale/degree. But once you have your arp running, that's when the fun really begins, because you can fulfill your own Klaus Schulze fantasies right in the browser (and eventually on hardware).

First, you can tweak arp voices, patterns, octaves, attack-release shape, as well as tempo divisions and per-part loop lengths (unequal lengths phase against each other, a la Steve Reich).

Second, record your own 16-step Sequence and apply it to any part, forwards or reversed, and record a chord progression that plays itself, moving the whole ensemble one degree per bar while the melody transposes to follow.

Third, add a Drone layer from one of five voice types, including Solina-like strings and a Mellotron-like choir.

Fourth, pass your arps through Effects, such as a tempo-synced delay, including dotted-8ths, four kinds of reverb, and a swirly phaser.

Fifth, auto-tweak everything in the Mod section: Cutoff, Resonance, Shape, Drive, Reverb, Pitch, Feedback, Delay, Volume, Phaser. There are five LFO shapes, from a simple Triangle to a Lorenz-attractor Chaos modulator, with cycle times down to 30 minutes.

Sixth, now that you have everything going, you have ten real-time performance controls in Master: Tempo, Pitch, Swing, Drive, Entropy (from precise to seasick), Cutoff, Resonance, Feedback (tuned to the key root, it will howl when pushed), Glide, Output.

Two unique features: the Anomaly button generates a random patch that's always in key, and the year selector swaps the whole circuit: 2026 is clinical, while 1983 gets pulse-width drift, drive with bias memory, and a CRT-effect over the screen.

One more thing to share, this synth operates by default in keys and scales, but it has also been designed to allow you to break free from that and go fully experimental and create noise. Almost all parameters go well beyond polite (check out the Gnarl, Scream preset for an example, but cover your ears).

Happy to answer any questions about the Web Audio engine, as of now the entire codebase lives in a single HTML file. I'm currently working on porting to the Daisy Seed platform, which has been both challenging and fun.

I appreciate you taking a look and giving some honest feedback. To answer your question, the AM-1 is more of an instrument designed to make playing layered arpeggios (and sequences to an extent) immediate and fun. This is a machine that is made for performance, which is a lot of what Berlin School music is to me. A tool like Stochas is amazing, but it's a sequencing tool, for music production purposes. The AM-1 you could use in your living room, or in a live performance (talking about the hardware version in the works, not so much this iteration).

Basically, I wanted to give people a way to have fun with arps and make some cool music in the process.

I took it down as it was fairly rambling and didn't do a good job to explain (confused people). I'm building the MVP atm. If you're interested to learn more, you can write me at [email protected]. I'd like to find collaborators.

If there was a valid reason to write software that efficiently, besides idealism, I'm sure developers would do so. But there isn't in the vast majority of cases, so we don't. iow computing resources are cheaper than labor.

I love seeing all these helpless billionaires and business owners flail trying to get people back in the office, with increasingly BS reasons. The world moved on and they can't stand they lost a tiny bit of control over workers.

The world has moved on from your viewpoint. Either catch up or get left behind.

Sure, if you want your best developers to leave. The question "Should I force...?" should always be met with the utmost skepticism. That's not the way to lead.

Every program you will ever write: Input -> Transformation -> Output. That may sound annoyingly simplistic, but internalizing that one concept gives you a foundation to break down any problem you encounter.

Mines great. I'm sitting at it right now.