Drone Swarm | mk IV

What's This?

Drone Swarm is an instrument built around stacks of drifting oscillators clustered into “groups,” each with its own tuning, modulation, and amplitude personality. Instead of playing, you sculpt relationships: master detune shifts the whole ecosystem, groups bend and breathe independently, and each oscillator adds its own micro-instability. Everything is alive and continuously morphing, but always under your control.

On top of that sits a snapshot-based sequencer that lets you capture entire tuning states—oscillator spreads, modulation shapes, detune clusters—and arrange them into evolving timelines. Scenes can morph into each other over time, loop naturally, or be triggered on demand for performance. It’s not a synth you play at so much as a sonic environment you guide, nudge, and let unfold.

Download the Distortion Drones patch (it's a json file) and load it to see what it can do.

Sorry, not optimized for mobile, yet

MIDI

• Master MIDI Channel – When set to 1–16, listens on that channel for:
  • Note On – Sets master detune based on the played MIDI note (A4=69 ⇒ 0¢).
  • CC7 – Controls master volume.
  • Pitch Bend – Adjusts master detune by up to ±200 cents.
• Master MIDI Channel = 0 (Off) – Disables all master-channel MIDI mappings.
• Input Selector – Chooses a specific MIDI input device or “All Inputs”.
• Refresh – Rescans for connected MIDI input devices.
• Status Line – Shows Web MIDI status and how many inputs were found.

Snapshot Sequencer

• Snapshot – Captures the current tuning state (master detune, all group volumes/detunes, LFO settings, and oscillator amps/detunes)
• Snapshots – Where your Snapshots are saved. From here you can drag them into the Sequence. Each Snapshot has (in this order):
  • Label - which is editable
  • Duration - How long a Snapshot plays until it goes to the next one
  • Crossfade Duration - How long it takes for the settings to morph into the next Snapshot
  • Play button - loads the settings of that Snapshot
  • Delete button - I'm pretty sure you can figure that out
• Sequence – Drag your Snapshots into the Sequencer to arrange a constantly morphing drone. Clicking on a Snapshot in the Sequence loads that Snapshot

Oscillator Group Creation

• Waveforms – Selects the default oscillator waveform (sine, sawtooth, square, triangle) used for new groups’ oscillators.
• Randomize – When enabled, each new oscillator gets a random detune amount around the default detune setting.
• # Oscillators – The number of oscillators to automatically create in a new group when “Create Oscillators” is pressed.
• Default Detune – Base detune amount (in cents) used for new oscillators; with Randomize on, this becomes the ±range for random detune.
• Base Freq – A centered detune knob that selects a base tuning; internally, the resulting frequency is snapped to the nearest note from notes.json.
• Create Oscillators – Creates a new group using the current waveform, base frequency, detune, and randomization settings, and seeds it with the specified number of oscillators.