Everything here works from the keyboard. If you've used an MPC the layout will feel familiar; if you haven't, start at the top and you'll have a beat running in about two minutes.
Open the machine and you'll meet the SESSION panel. Connect a wallet, sign the message it shows you, and the panel checks your balance on chain 4663. One signature, no transaction, no gas — signing proves the address is yours, nothing more.
Under the threshold, you'll see exactly what you hold, what's needed, and the contract address to buy against. What's needed comes from the server rather than from the page, so the figure you're shown is the one you're actually measured against. The Check again button reads the chain fresh — use it after a purchase lands rather than reloading.
You only sign once. The session is remembered in this browser for twelve hours, so a reload — or closing the browser and coming back later — walks straight in. Switching to a different wallet clears it and asks again.
Sixteen pads, arranged the way the keyboard is. The bottom row of the grid is the bottom row of your keys, so your hand position on the keyboard maps to your hand position on the machine.
Clicking a pad both plays it and selects it — the sequencer row and the inspector on the right follow whatever pad you last touched.
Drag an audio file onto any pad and it replaces that pad's synth voice. WAV, MP3, OGG, M4A and FLAC all work. Right-click a pad to clear the sample and get the original voice back.
A file always lands on the pad you aimed it at, whether that pad was empty or already had something. ◂ Load Samples does the same from the selected pad: pick one file and it goes there, pick several and they fill along the row from there, replacing as they go. It loads into whichever bank you're looking at, and stops at the last pad rather than wrapping around.
Click the pad's name in the inspector to rename it. A name you type wins over the filename — so a pad you called KICK stays KICK whatever you drop on it next. Leave the box empty to un-name it and get the module's name back; RESET does the same. Melodic pads are named by their note and can't be renamed, which is the point of them.
The file is uploaded as you drop it, so it survives a reload — both in a saved project and in the draft. What's kept is a reference rather than a copy of the audio, and it's fetched back when the machine loads. A pad whose file can't be fetched falls back to its synth voice and says so, rather than sitting silent.
The BANK dropdown in the transport switches which instrument the sixteen pads are playing. Tab cycles through them in order.
All five play at once on the same timeline. Switching banks changes what you're editing, never what's playing — a pattern holds drums, bass, chords and melody together.
The four melodic banks are laid out in C minor across two octaves, highest notes at the top. You can't hit a wrong note by accident, which is the point. To move a pad off the scale, select it and use the NOTE slider in the inspector.
A module retunes every pad at once to a style. It isn't a sample pack — no audio files are involved. It's a set of values for the same synthesis engine: where the hat's filter sits and how narrow it rings, how fast the kick's pitch falls and how hard the beater hits, the FM ratio inside the Rhodes, where the swing sits.
Those go deep enough to change what an instrument is, not just how it's tuned. Drill's bass is a sawtooth through a resonant filter that opens and shuts on every note — a squelch. Trap's is a clean sine that glides and holds. Same voice, different instrument.
A module can also change which instrument a pad is at all. There are seven drum voices behind the sixteen pads, and a module says which one each pad uses and what to call it. So the disks built around a real kit drop the 808 nobody was playing and put their own instruments there instead:
The pad names change with them, so the grid always tells you what you're hitting. Loading one of the other seven puts the machine's own pads back — modules never stack, so you hear the one you loaded rather than it layered over the last.
Eleven of them: boom bap, trap, drill, house, jungle, lo-fi, rock, punk, funk, detroit — and blank, which is the odd one out. Blank has no sounds at all: sixteen empty pads waiting for files you drop on them. Load it when you want to build a kit of your own rather than play someone else's. Each voices all sixteen drum pads and all four melodic banks. Rock is a drummer's kit — the most shell of any snare here, with the ride carrying the eighths and toms for the fill. Punk cuts every decay to the shortest in the set. Funk leans hardest on velocity, with more ghost notes than accents. Detroit is house with the warmth taken out.
Some are included; the rest unlock by burning SESSION on the modules page, where every one plays in full before you decide — through the machine's own voices and the module's own pads, so the preview is the thing itself rather than an impression of it. Which is which, and what each costs, comes from the server rather than from the page — so the price you see is the price the burn is checked against.
Loading a module replaces the voicing across all five banks and drops its own demo pattern into A6, switching you there. Your other seven patterns are untouched — the same beats, now available through a different kit. Save first if you've dialled something in you want to keep, and know that whatever was in A6 is gone.
Hit Space to start. A boom-bap pattern is already loaded on A4 so there's something to take apart.
The wide row of sixteen buttons is the currently selected pad across one bar. The row underneath — the pattern overview — shows all sixteen pads at once; click a name on the left to jump to editing that pad, or click any square in the grid to toggle it directly.
Clicking a step cycles it through four states rather than two: off, then normal, then accent, then ghost, then off again. The height of the lit block tells you which — full for an accent, medium for normal, short for a ghost. Programmed and recorded hits land on normal, which leaves room to push a step above the rest or tuck one underneath.
Steps 1, 5, 9 and 13 are the downbeats and are drawn brighter. The small purple dot above the odd-numbered steps marks the ones that swing moves.
The select beside the pattern name sets how long that pattern is: 16, 32 or 64 steps — one, two or four bars. It's set per pattern, so a four-bar verse can sit next to a one-bar loop.
Past one bar, tabs appear above the step row. The row stays sixteen columns at full size and pages between bars rather than shrinking to fit, so a long pattern stays as easy to edit as a short one. The step numbers count through the whole pattern, so bar 3 reads 33 to 48.
Lengthening a pattern copies what's already in it into the new bars, so going from one bar to four gives you four copies to vary rather than a beat followed by silence. Shortening asks first, and only if hits would actually be lost.
Clear Row wipes the selected pad. Clear Pattern wipes only the bank you're looking at, so you won't lose your bassline while cleaning up the drums.
REC arms recording. It goes red and pulses while armed. Start the sequencer, play pads with the mouse or the keyboard, and the hits are written into the pattern as you go.
Arming while stopped is fine — capture begins when playback does. Stopping disarms, so coming back to the machine later can't record over a take you meant to keep.
Hits snap to the nearest sixteenth rather than the last one that passed, so playing a shade ahead of the beat lands on the beat instead of behind it. Everything recorded arrives at normal velocity; accent afterwards by clicking the step.
Recording only ever adds. A step that already holds something keeps it, so playing over a pattern can't quietly wipe an accent you placed by hand.
UNDO puts the pattern back to how it was when you armed — one level, covering the whole take across all five banks. It stays available after you use it, so a second take undoes to the same starting point. With nothing recorded yet it tells you so rather than doing nothing.
On a pattern longer than a bar the view follows the transport while it runs, so the bar you're recording into is the one on screen. Click a bar tab yourself and it stays there until playback stops.
Swing delays every second sixteenth note. At 50% nothing moves and the beat is dead straight. Higher values push those notes later, which is what makes a pattern feel human instead of typed in.
The readout under the sequencer shows the delay in milliseconds at your current tempo, so you can see what the percentage is actually doing. Swing is per-project, not per-pattern.
The inspector on the right edits whichever pad is selected.
Choke is what makes a closed hat silence an open one. Open HH and CL HAT are both in group 1 by default, which is why they never overlap. Set two pads to the same number and the newer hit always wins.
Reset returns the selected pad to how it arrived — the module's pad if one is loaded, the project's if you opened one, otherwise the machine's own. On a kit with a china on the bottom row, resetting that pad gives you the china back rather than an 808. It only touches the one pad, and it leaves a sample you dropped there alone.
The FX RACK button opens two effects shared by every pad. Rather than putting an effect on a sound, you send an amount of that sound into a shared effect — the same way a real desk works, and the reason a whole kit can share one reverb tail without sounding like sixteen separate rooms.
Set the amount per pad with the VERB and DELAY sliders in the inspector. A pad with a send above zero shows a small coloured dot in its corner.
Size picks the room. Damp rolls off the top of the tail — more damping is a duller, more natural space. Low cut keeps bass out of the reverb, which is almost always what you want; a kick drum in a big reverb turns to mud.
Time is locked to the tempo, from a thirty-second note up to a half note, including dotted and triplet. Feedback is how many repeats. Tone darkens each repeat so echoes fall back rather than piling up.
Eight pattern slots, A1 through A8. Each holds one, two or four bars across all five banks, set per pattern. The hit count under each name tells you which ones have something in them.
Click a pattern while stopped and it switches immediately. Click one while playing and it goes yellow — queued — then changes cleanly at the end of the current pattern rather than cutting mid-phrase. On a four-bar pattern that means the end of bar 4, not the end of bar 1. Click the queued one again to cancel. Shift plus a number does the same from the keyboard.
COPY duplicates the current pattern into the first empty slot, or asks where to put it if they're all full. That's the fastest way to make a variation: copy, then change two things.
Eight slots, each holding a pattern and a repeat count from 1 to 32. Click a slot to assign. A repeat is one pass of the pattern, so two repeats of a four-bar pattern is eight bars. Playback runs the slots in order and loops back to the start. Empty slots are skipped, so you don't have to fill them in order.
SAVE stores the whole machine: all eight patterns across all five banks with their lengths and velocities, every pad's settings, the song arrangement, FX parameters, tempo and swing. The first save asks for a name; after that the same session keeps being updated.
A sample you drop on a pad is stored too. The project keeps a reference to it rather than the audio, and fetches it back when the project loads. If one can't be fetched, that pad falls back to its synth voice and the screen tells you how many did — the beat still plays.
PROJECTS lists everything you've saved, newest first. Click one to load it — that replaces what's currently in the machine, so save first if you're mid-idea. Clicking the name in the transport renames the session.
Saving to the cloud is manual on purpose: nothing is written to a project until you ask for it.
Separately, whatever is on screen is kept in this browser and comes back when you return, so a reload doesn't cost you a take. It never writes to a saved project — that's still SAVE's job — and it belongs to the wallet that made it, so a shared machine won't hand your unsaved work to whoever connects next.
Discard draft, in the PROJECTS panel, throws it away and puts the demo beat back. It asks first, since unsaved work is the only thing it can destroy.
$ SELL in the transport lists a beat on the beat store. It renders the same WAV that EXPORT would, uploads it, and sells it as a file — buyers get audio for their DAW, not your session, so your pads and patterns stay yours. You keep 95%; 5% goes to the treasury.
The panel shows what you are already selling before the form for selling something else: what each beat cost, how many times it sold, and what actually arrived in your wallet. Unlist takes one off the shop — anyone who already bought it keeps their copy and can still download it, which is why it asks rather than warns.
Price changes what a beat costs without relisting it, so it keeps its sales and its history. Anyone already looking at the old price can still pay it for about fifteen minutes afterwards — their page was showing that number in good faith — so a sale at yesterday's price just after a change is expected rather than a fault. For the same reason you can only change a price once inside that window; the machine says how long is left rather than letting you set a price it could not honour.
◆ SAVE KIT, next to SAVE in the transport, keeps the sixteen drum pads without the beat — the voices, the names, the tuning, and any samples on them. Load it later and it changes the pads and leaves your patterns alone, so you can put your own drums on a beat you already have.
Save under a name you have used for a kit before and it offers to replace that kit rather than leaving you with two. Cancel saves nothing at all — give it a different name if you want to keep both. A beat that happens to share the name is never touched.
Saved kits sit at the top of the PROJECTS list under their own heading, marked with a ◆. Clicking one loads it as a kit rather than replacing your session, so there is no way to open the wrong thing by accident. A kit is yours: it follows your wallet to any machine, but it can't be handed to anyone else yet, because the samples on it are stored under your address.
EXPORT WAV renders to a 16-bit stereo file at 44.1 kHz. Pattern mode renders the current pattern twice — two full passes, so a four-bar pattern gives eight bars — and song mode renders the whole arrangement. The panel shows the length before you commit. The tail setting adds silence at the end so reverb and delay have room to finish instead of being cut off.
Rendering happens faster than real time and offline, so nothing is recorded through your speakers — the file is exactly what the machine would play, including every FX and tuning setting as they are right now.
The beat store is the other side of the same shop, and it is open to anyone with a wallet — buying needs no SESSION and no account. Part of every beat plays before you pay.
What you get is a WAV. Drag it into whatever you record in and write over it: it is audio, not a project, so there is nothing to install and nothing to learn. Beats are non-exclusive, which means the producer may sell the same one to somebody else — buying it does not take it off the shop.
Paying is one transaction in USDG on chain 4663. The price is re-read the moment before you sign, so a beat repriced while your tab sat open asks you again rather than charging a number you never agreed to. The producer is paid 95% and the treasury 5%, in the same transaction — nothing is held in between.
Once it is confirmed the card offers Download, and keeps offering it: the purchase is recorded against your address, so you can come back for the file on any machine by connecting the same wallet. If your payment goes through but the confirmation does not, the receipt is kept in the browser and the card offers Retry — it checks the same payment again and cannot charge you twice.
One thing worth knowing rather than discovering: a beat can be taken down. If someone establishes a claim on the rights to it, it comes off the shop and stops being downloadable, and the card will say Taken down. That is rare and it is not automatic, but it is possible, so a beat you intend to keep is worth keeping a copy of rather than relying on this page to hold it for you.
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| Space | Start or stop the sequencer |
| 1–4 Q–R A–F Z–V | Play and select the sixteen pads |
| Tab | Next bank |
| Shift + 1–8 | Switch pattern, queued to the end of the pattern while playing |
| Right-click a pad | Clear its loaded sample |
| Drag a file onto a pad | Load that audio onto it |
Browsers block audio until you interact with the page. Click any pad first. If it's still silent, check that the tab isn't muted — Chrome mutes per-tab and it's easy to miss.
Chain 4663's public RPC rate-limits under load. This is temporary and has nothing to do with your balance. Wait a moment and press Check again.
The check reads the address you signed with. If your wallet holds SESSION in a different account, switch accounts in the wallet — the page reloads automatically — and connect again.
Audio is scheduled against the sound card's own clock, so playback stays accurate, but the on-screen playhead can stutter if the browser is struggling. What you hear is right even when the display lags.
The burn and the unlock are two separate things. Burning is a transaction: once it lands the tokens are gone, whatever happens next. Unlocking is the server checking that receipt and recording it against your address, and that part can fail on its own — most often because the module is new and the server hasn't been told about it yet.
Nothing is lost when it does. The receipt is kept in your browser, and the card shows Retry unlock in place of the burn button. Pressing it sends the same receipt again and cannot burn a second time — it costs nothing to press, as often as you like.
If the card is asking for the price again rather than offering a retry, the receipt is gone: a different browser, or site data cleared. The burn still happened on chain, so the transaction hash is enough to sort it out by hand.
TILT in the bottom-right corner turns the perspective off. It's already off on phones and for anyone with reduced-motion turned on.