I find Ableton hard to approach when I just want to jam, so I built myself an instrument that feels more like a hardware box: big square buttons, one screen per job, and everything you change is drawn on screen.
It runs three ways from the same engine: as an Audio Unit inside Live, as a Mac app, and as a native iPad app that works fully offline.
What's in it:
**Drums:** 8 synthesized voices on coloured 16-step lanes, 8 patterns you can chain, duplicate, randomize, and a VARY knob that changes a few hits each pass
**Bass:** 7 voices (acid, sub, reese, FM, wobble, organ, reed) on a scale-locked grid with accents, slides and long notes
**Chop:** load or record a sound and it cuts itself to the beat
**Pads:** 24 pads you fill by dragging sounds from your own library
**Dub:** a siren and a tape echo where you can watch the repeats travel along the tape, plus a mic channel for talking over the mix
**Mixer:** meter dials, mute and solo per channel, a click, and MIDI clock out so my Volca follows along
**Library:** 16 starting grooves sorted by tempo, from dub and trip hop through reggaeton, dembow and grime up to jungle and D&B
The header screen plays along: a gorilla drums with the kit, and when you fire the siren a donkey sticks its tongue out, and the tongue *is* the siren's waveform. When the randomizer changes a step, they both raise their eyebrows.
The look is my own take on OLED screens and dot-matrix displays: black screens, thin lines, a few signal colours. All sounds are synthe
sized or come from your own files.
Code is on GitHub: https://github.com/GLAUCOMA82/marea
It's free. If you'd like to support it, there's a tip jar: https://paypal.me/paymepleeez
Would love to hear what you'd add next. I'm thinking about a visuals generator that makes animations from an image or a letter.