Show HN: Draw.Audio – A musical sketchpad using the Web Audio API

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)

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!

Flower Garden: https://draw.audio/s/hngnldoov

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.

Here's some techno :) https://draw.audio/s/lifgm2yl3

I guess synths usually use some kind of logarithmic scales?

https://draw.audio/s/9fr7reqry

Very fun!

A small 'bug', folding and unfolding the left panels change the aspect ratio of rectangle pads.

I think it would cool to have a tutorial. I know nothing about music but it could be fun to learn some of it while trying how some patterns sound.

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

Example: https://draw.audio/s/z2gcctra8

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.

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!

https://schematix.com/~devenson/spectroid.png

The only thing I'd love to see is MIDI or audio export....