Signal Chain's rule again — every unit is both an input and an output — pointed at a different sound: precise clicks instead of pedal warmth, pure sine test-tones instead of waveshaped oscillators, bit-crushed digital grit and true ring modulation instead of chorus and drive, stepped hard-panning instead of a smooth stereo field. Built toward the minimal/microsound lineage of Ryoji Ikeda, Alva Noto, and the Raster-Noton label — clicks, sines, noise, and silence, arranged with more precision than warmth. Drag between the nubs to route audio, click a footswitch to bypass a unit, drag a knob to shape it.Patch cables in the Connections list below the transport, tap a footswitch to bypass a unit, drag a slider to shape it. Everything is a real Web Audio graph, limited to exactly what a browser can actually do — no external plugins, no sample library, just oscillators, filters, delays, and a shaper curve, arranged carefully.
The same universal-node rule as Signal Chain, reused rather than reinvented. Every unit exposes an in and at least one out, any out can patch into any in, and a footswitch is a real bypass — off, a unit is a plain wire; on, it does its job. What's different here isn't the architecture, it's the content: eight units built toward clicks, pure tones, and digital artifacts instead of pedal-style warmth, in the minimal/microsound lineage of Ryoji Ikeda's data-precise test tones, Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai)'s glitch-and-sine language, and the Raster-Noton label the two of them ran together — referenced here as an aesthetic lineage this instrument is built toward, not an affiliation with either artist or the label.
Tone is a single, undistorted sine — no waveshaping, just a hard-clip safety net so it can't blow up a feedback loop — with a second output, ratio, running at a knob-set frequency ratio to the main pitch (0.25 to 2×) instead of a fixed octave, so the two outputs can be patched as a precise harmonic pair. Click I and Click II are pure impulses, not tones: a highpassed noise burst gated by a near-instant envelope, repeated on a short exact delay, with their own width knob stretching that envelope from a single hard tick to a short blip. Like Sonar on Signal Chain, their in watches for a rising edge and fires an extra pulse on it, so patching one into the other locks their rhythms together.
Crush does two kinds of digital damage at once: a bits knob quantizes the waveform into as few as two steps via a staircase shaper curve, and a gate knob amplitude-modulates it with a square wave — slow, it chops the signal into a rhythmic stutter; fast, it aliases into a buzzy, gritty texture. Ring is a true ring modulator — an internal oscillator multiplies straight against the incoming signal rather than just mixing with it, which is what makes the output inharmonic and metallic instead of just louder. Field is a panner with nowhere smooth to go: its LFO is quantized through the same kind of staircase curve Crush uses, so instead of drifting across the stereo field it jumps between 2 to 8 fixed positions — the hard, mechanical stereo movement this genre often reaches for instead of a chorus-style sweep.
The 1kHz Ref button in the transport injects a plain sine reference tone straight into the master bus — the same calibration-tone habit test equipment and this genre's own cover art both share, useful here for actually checking your monitoring level before turning anything else on. Feedback loops are allowed on purpose, the same as Signal Chain: Output's own out can patch back into the board, and the compressor and hard limiter before the speakers exist specifically so that stays loud, not dangerous. Start any feedback patch with low levels.
Pulse Train II continues the same rule with a different rack: a second Tone, and three effects that weren't here — a delay pushed toward infinite freeze, a short-delay comb resonator, and a synthetic-impulse convolution reverb.