A pedalboard built on one rule instead of many: every unit is both an input and an output. There's no fixed role for "source" or "effect" — an oscillator, a noise generator, two Ryoji Ikeda-leaning precision-pulse units, a filter, a drive, a chorus and an echo all carry the same two jacks and the same footswitch, so any of them can sit anywhere in the chain, run in parallel, split into two paths, or feed back into an earlier one. 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 — turning a knob on the Oscillator redraws its own scope in real time.
One connector type, everywhere. Patch Bay (the site's other synth) uses three cable kinds — audio, CV, trigger — that can only join their own kind. Signal Chain has exactly one: every unit exposes an in and at least one out, and any out can patch into any in. That's what "universal node" means here — there's no dedicated source module or dedicated effect module, just eight units that all speak the same connector.
The footswitch is a real bypass. Off, a unit is a plain wire: whatever reaches its in passes straight to its out, unprocessed, and its own sound (if it makes one) goes silent. On, the unit does its job — the Oscillator sings, the Filter splits the signal, the Drive saturates it. That symmetry is what lets any unit sit anywhere in the chain without special-casing.
The default patch: Oscillator + Noise → Filter → Drive → Shimmer → Echo → Output, with Sonar and Sonar II both layered straight into Output. Every one of the eight units is doing something audible from the moment you hit Power.
Extra logic per unit, since not every jack should behave the same way. The Oscillator's in isn't audio — it's FM: whatever you patch there modulates its pitch instead of getting mixed in, so a slow square-wave Oscillator patched into another Oscillator's in makes it warble. Sonar and Sonar II watch their own in for a rising edge and fire an extra pulse on it — patch a pulsing source into either and it locks to that rhythm, on top of its own internal clock. Noise isn't just white noise: its own selector switches between a plain hiss, a slow rise-and-fall swell, a strobing random-level glitch, and a fixed on/off timing pattern. The Filter has two outputs from one cutoff knob: out is the selected band, comp is its exact complement (lowpass ⇄ highpass, or a notch when set to bandpass) — a two-way crossover for free. The Oscillator's second output, sub, is the same waveform one octave down.
Feedback loops are allowed, on purpose. Because outputs can feed backward as easily as forward — including Output's own out, tapped straight from the master bus — you can patch the end of the chain back into its beginning and get a self-sustaining, evolving drone. The Output module always runs through a compressor and a hard limiter before the speakers, specifically so that kind of experiment stays loud, not dangerous. Start any feedback patch with low levels.