I wanted the feeling of sitting down with a small "DAWless" hardware setup: a synth, some drums, a midi recorder, and knobs to turn. Something you can open for a quick jam, with enough care put into the sound that you’ll want to keep playing. The spirit is close to a DAWless setup, with the convenience of a browser tab.
The linked demo is a recreation of Kavinsky’s Nightcall. It opens as a playable session, so you can listen, explore the instruments, and change the sounds yourself. All the audio is generated locally in your browser.
I spent 80% of the dev time on Cybelle, a clone of the Juno-106, with a C++/WebAssembly sound engine. It was built with a SPICE model (model of the original circuit), which I then calibrated against my real hardware Juno. Reproducing the filter and the chorus took many iterations and blind tests, and I believe it strikes a good balance of audio fidelity and CPU performance for most laptops. To my ears, the Juno presets and filter sweeps sound the same between my hardware and Cybelle (as in, I can't differentiate them in blind tests).
An interesting side-effect of using "hill-climbing" agentic loops to optimize the sound engine is that I ended up spending hours on the UI as well, trying to make it immersive and photo-realistic.
I’d especially love feedback from people who make music with hardware: how does it sound, how does it feel to play, and what would make you reach for it when you have a few minutes to make music?
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50358282
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