Here’s a tip: change your browser preferences to open this groovebox as a new tab / homepage, any time you need to escape doomscrolling, social media, and depressing news and get back in the groove.
maxjvh writes us to tell us about their creation tahti.studio, a labor of love inspired by Elektron’s fine groove hardware and workflows. It seems ideal for the person who adores their Elektron machine enough that they want to have some echo of it even looking back from their browser.
We’ve seen lots of these kinds of creations over the years – ah, remember the days when some folks were predicting browser tools would replace everything else? But this one is unusually powerful.
You get support for your own samples, for one, and easy secret link sharing of grooves you create means you can use this as a collaboration tool – or just a way of sending folks your feelings by drum machine pattern instead of words.
Single cycle waveforms? Yes. Powerful voice architecture? You bet. Per-step trigger conditions and p-locks and microtiming? I mean, honestly, this actually bests a fair amount of hardware. Add some sends and you could even finish stuff on this – but it also looks like a cute way of making some loops at random times that you can later load on your DAW or hardware.
Highlights from the developer:
sample-based sound generation with support for single-cycle waveforms
almost all parameters can be modulated on a per-step basis
each track has a multimode filter, distortion, frequency shifter, sample-rate reducer, and amp envelope
three freely assignable modulation sources per track (essentially flexible LFOs that can be used in one-shot mode)
steps have micro-timing, retriggering, probability, and trigger conditions
tracks can have individual lengths and sequencer speeds (the latter can even be step-modulated, because why not)
four send effect: chorus, phaser, reverb, delay
a master compressor and soft clipper
macro controls for working with all kinds of inputs (check out the shortcuts)
pattern sharing via secret links (e.g. tahti 13)
rendering patterns to .wav
There’s more, too – hover over parameters for handy tool tips. Because it runs in-browser, and it’s well-coded scaling works nicely. I had good luck in Firefox so Chrome isn’t strictly necessary – Firefox is finally catching up with these things. But this also means I can recommend this to my dad to run on his Chromebook if he wants to try messing around with stuff.
I’m going to try that homepage hack myself. I mean, obviously, just make sure your browser also points directly at CDM, too.
Tahti.studio – a groovebox for the browser [massive Elektronauts thread with announcement and discussion]
Max is a Finland-based artist and coder, and for coders out there, there’s a fascinating tool as the basis of all this – SOUL, a new programming language for music, worth its own story soon (ideally when I’m less jetlagged):