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Free guides, no account needed. Pick the lessons that interest you.
Understand sound
Explore sound, synthesis and mixing with interactive experiments.
Create your own tools
Build instruments, effects and MIDI tools for your music.
Get the book
Keep the guides beside your next project. Read the free book at your own pace, with links to try the experiments online.
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Choose what you want to make
Sampling
Turn a recording into an instrument
Trim recordings, map them to notes and make a playable instrument.
Make a sound playable
Synth sound design
Get beyond presets
Shape a synth’s tone, note length and movement with confidence.
Shape a sound of your own
Modular synthesis
Make your patch do what you mean
Trace audio and control signals, fix silent patches and add movement.
Understand your patch
Expressive synth playing
Make synth parts feel played
Use touch, velocity and envelopes to shape an expressive synth phrase.
Shape an expressive phrase
Songwriting and arrangement
Turn your loop into a piece
Develop a loop into sections, transitions and a finished arrangement.
Start with arrangement
Mixing
Give every part room
Balance parts, untangle the low end and create space in your mix.
Make room in your mix
Audio programming
Build the effect you're missing
Write, test and refine a small audio effect with a clear musical purpose.
Build a first effect
Explore the chapters
Choose a subject and explore its guides at your own pace.
Listen and understand
Hear what's really going on in a sound, and the musical ideas that organise it: pitch, rhythm, harmony and form.
Make sounds
Build sounds from scratch with synthesis, or capture a real instrument and turn it into something playable.
Shape and mix
Every effect explained by ear, then the mixing moves that make a whole song sit together.
Compose and perform
Program beats, sequence patterns, compose with sampled instruments and play it all live.
Build and share
Use audio models creatively, build your own instruments and tools, and bring them to the people who'll play them.
Audio machine learning and creative sensing
Understand what audio models can contribute to a musical idea, and hear the limits before choosing a technique.
14 guidesExplore chapter
Build your own tools
Translate a musical intention into a focused tool whose sound and behavior you can test.
10 guidesExplore chapter
Instrument design and publishing
Make an instrument understandable and useful to someone else, from its controls to the way it is shared.
8 guidesExplore chapter
Recipes and projects
Make one recognisable sound, or take a musical idea from start to finish.
Recipes
Short guides for making a sound you know, with a preset you can make your own.
Projects
Carry one piece of work across several topics, from your first experiment to something you can play.
What would you like to learn next?
Tell us what you’re trying to make, what’s still confusing, or which topic you’d like us to cover. Have an idea for a lesson or a project we could make together? We’d love to hear it.