How It Works

1. Open Ambient. Tap the big red PLAY switch (or the floating ▶ button bottom-right). Sound starts immediately.
2. Turn the five mood knobs. They cross-fade between soft and heavy layers in real time — nothing breaks.
3. Pick a Preset for an instant scene, or build your own and press Save Snapshot to keep it forever.
4. Want to play notes by hand? Open Playground.

An infinite, self-evolving soundscape. It never repeats. Leave it on for ten minutes or ten hours.

• Sticky cockpit — the slim bar that follows you down the page. Holds Play/Pause, the live scene readout (root · scale · noise), the master Volume slider, and a one-tap Undo for dial moves.
• Play / Pause — the recessed red switch, the cockpit button, or the floating circular button bottom-right. All three stay in sync.
• PLAYING LED — amber when audio is running.
• Oscilloscope — phosphor-green visual of the live output.
• Limiter bargraph — flashes red if the mix is hitting the ceiling. Pull Volume back if it stays lit.
• Ambient tinting — the page subtly shifts hue with the current chord root. Cosmetic, but it tells your eye when the scene moves.

• Mood — Crossfades between soft (bells, piano) and heavy (saw stack, feedback delay) layers. Low = calm, high = brooding.
• Evolution — How fast the scene drifts. Low = nearly static. High = constant motion.
• Density — How many notes / events happen per minute.
• Brightness — Master tone tilt. Low = warm and dark. High = airy and glassy.
• Atmosphere — Reverb size — small room to cathedral.

Master output. Independent from your device volume. Set this once at a comfortable level and use the device volume for fine adjustments.

• Root note — the tonic the whole scene tunes to (C through B).
• Octave — shifts everything up or down. Negative = deeper, more sub. Positive = sparkle.
• Chord shape — the harmonic flavor (innocent, modal, suspended, etc.). Changes the mood at a structural level.
• Wave shape — the underlying timbre of the pad oscillators. Sine = pure. Saw = rich. Triangle / square = in-between.
• Noise color — pink (soft, rainy) or white (bright, hissy). Set the noise level with the dial in the textures section.

The small graph under the Curve dial shows how density translates to triggers in real time. Low curve = linear and even; high curve = quiet most of the time with sudden bursts. Watch the line bend as you turn it.

One tap = a fully designed scene (knobs + scene + voices). The classic bank includes Dream Wife (lullaby), Cosmic Void (spacious dark), Tape Cathedral (gospel reverb), and King PP(neon & playful). The new Factory bank in the Studio Bench adds eight read-only starting points — Glacier, Tape Choir, Deep Space, and friends — that you can't overwrite by accident.

1. Dial in a scene you love.
2. Type a name in the input.
3. Hit Save — the box flashes amber to confirm.
4. Press Recall any time to restore every dial, scene, and voice setting exactly. Press Delete to remove.

Snapshots live in this browser only (up to 24). Use Export / Import to move them between devices as a JSON file.

A dedicated module that gathers the production-grade tools in one place.

• Undo — 20-step ring buffer for dial changes. Click the undo glyph or hit ⌘Z / Ctrl-Z.
• A / B Morph — capture the current scene into A, tweak, capture into B, then drag the morph slider to crossfade between the two snapshots in real time. Here's how it works:
  1. Save A — locks in every dial, voice volume, density, reverb send, chord shape, wave shape, and root note.
  2. Tweak — change anything you want.
  3. Save B — locks in the new scene.
  4. Morph — drag the slider to blend between A and B. All continuous values (dial positions, per-voice volume / presence / dub send) crossfade smoothly. Discrete settings (which voices are on/off, chord shape, wave shape, noise color, root note) snap to whichever slot the slider is closer to — B when past 50%, A when before.
  5. Swap — flips A and B and inverts the slider so you can keep exploring without losing your place.

  You don't need both slots saved to use the Ambient Machine — morphing is just an extra creative tool for discovering sounds between two scenes you already like.

• Tempo Sync — toggle BPM-quantized triggers. Voice spawns snap to musical beat-multiples (½, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16) of the chosen BPM instead of free-running.
• Bounce to file — records the master output to a WAV you can download. The button shows live elapsed time while recording.
• Factory bank — eight curated read-only scenes, one tap to recall.

Each layer (drone, pads, bells, piano, saw stack, delay tap, reverse swells, sub pulse, noise) has its own LED enable switch, a M / S pair (Mute / Solo) for live isolation, and a single slider whose job is set by the rotary mode selector next to it. Tap the selector to cycle through three positions:

• VOL — raw loudness of that voice in the mix. 0% mutes the layer, 100% is full tilt.
• PRES — presence, i.e. how often the voice is allowed to spawn. Low = sparse and distant, high = dense and forward in the field.
• DUB — how much of the voice is tapped into the long dub-delay return. Push it up for cavernous, ricocheting trails.

The slider colour and readout follow the active mode so you always know what you're tweaking. Settings persist per voice — flip back to a mode and your previous value is still there. Solo wins over Mute: if any voice is soloed, only soloed voices sound.

The nine layers:

• Drone bed — three detuned oscillators locked in slow LFO pitch drift. The foundation everything else floats on.
• Pad voices — sine and triangle chord swells shaped by long envelopes. Harmonic warmth that breathes in and out.
• Crystalline bells — FM tones with long decay and built-in shimmer. Most audible when Mood is low (soft side).
• Distant piano — additive-harmonic tones with a soft attack, evoking felt hammers in a large room. Fades as Mood rises.
• Modulated saw stack — rich PWM-style detune drift. The heavy anchor that appears as Mood crosses toward the dark side.
• Feedback delay tap — long, self-oscillating echoes that build into a smear of harmonic memory.
• Reverse swells — envelope-reversed pad bursts that suck in and bloom outward. Cinematic tension and release.
• Sub pulse — irregular low-end bumps that give the scene a heartbeat without becoming a drum.
• Texture noise — pink or white noise through a wandering bandpass filter. Rain, wind, or distant traffic depending on brightness.

Soft layers (bells, piano) fade out as Mood rises past 0.5; heavy layers (saw stack, delay tap, reverse swells, sub pulse) fade in. The drone, pads, and noise are always available.

A live trigger meter above the voice bank. One row per enabled voice with:

• Green track — that voice's density ceiling (how full its bar is allowed to get). Set by the per-voice DENSvalue.
• Bright amber flash — a fire. The scheduler rolled, the global Density + Curve gate let it through, and the voice triggered.
• Faint tick — a skipped attempt. The scheduler rolled but the DENS gate blocked it. Useful for seeing why a sparse scene feels sparse.

Tweak per-voice DENS or the global Curve knob and watch the rhythm reshape in real time.

The circular visualizer at the top of the voice bank shows every enabled voice as a node around a ring. Filaments connect voices that share active chord intervals; nodes flash when a voice triggers under the DENS gate. It's a live x-ray of the engine — at a glance you can see who's actually firing right now.

Hands-on synth + step sequencer. This is where you play notes, build beats, and audition voices.

• Tap or click keys to play. Multi-touch works on phones — hit chords with several fingers.
• The Scale selector locks the keyboard to a musical scale so every key sounds good together.
• Engine picks the synth voice (Classic, Granular, Chaos, Aftertouch). Each one feels different under your fingers.
• Intensity is the master expression slider — pushes dynamics, brightness, and harmonics together.

1. Press Play on the transport. The playhead walks across the steps.
2. Tap a cell on a track row (kick, snare, hat, bass…) to turn it on. Tap again to turn off.
3. Adjust BPM, swing, and per-track volume / FX send on the right of each row.
4. Use Save to store a pattern, Copy / Paste to duplicate it, Trash to clear it.
5. Open Pattern Library to browse featured patterns and load them into your slot.

The mode switcher above the sequencer reshapes the kit and unlocks a dedicated console for each style. The Guitar track is shared across modes but its voice changes per mode.

• Shared — the default kit. Dark Wave, Industrial, and the general-purpose patterns live here.
• Dub — opens the Dub Console: tape echo throws, spring crash, siren, lift, plus the melodica hold voice.
• Thrash — opens the Thrash Console: palm-mute chug, crash hits, and a held lead-guitar voice with a solo generator (intensity + style + BPM).
• Punk — 168 BPM, 64-step lofi three-chord garage. Swaps the Guitar track for a palm-muted power-chord voice that follows the bass line. The Guitar Rig console exposes Mute length, Crunch, and Cab tone so you can dial in tight chug → ringy garage on the fly.

• The Playground synth is independent of the Ambient Machine — you can run both at once and they'll mix.
• Tap Maximize on the keyboard to go full-width on phones.

Advanced controls. Most days you won't need them — but when you do, scroll to the footer and use the small Mixer and Voice links.

• Master volume, reverb, and FX routing for the Playground engine.
• Tone scale column — the global default scale for new sessions.
• Calibration — fine-tune tuning, velocity curve, and latency to match your device.

ADSR (attack / decay / sustain / release) graphs on a phosphor display. Tweak the envelope and trigger a test note to hear the change before you commit it to a preset.

• No sound? Tap anywhere on the page first — browsers block audio until you interact. Then press Play.
• Distorted / clipping? The limiter LED is telling you so. Pull Volume down a notch.
• Sliders feel sticky on mobile? Drag the round thumb directly — the touch target is larger than it looks.
• Lost a snapshot? Snapshots are per-browser. Clearing site data or switching browsers loses them. Save your favorites somewhere safe (screenshot the dial positions).
• Battery draining? Hit Pause when you walk away — the audio engine is always running while Play is lit.