88 Synthwave Machine

A synthwave workstation with a generative track writer. Everything is synthesized — an analog polysynth, a four-operator FM engine and four drum machines — so there is nothing to download.

Quick start

1. Hit Write a Track — it arranges a whole track and plays it.
2. Change Style, Key, Scale, Tempo or Density, then write another.
3. Export it as MP3, WAV or MIDI.

Loop repeats the track; Auto-next writes a new one when it ends, after the effects have rung out.

Styles

Each style sets its own scale, drum machine, rack and effects (with Style loads rack on). The Scale menu also has exotic, darker scales to try on any style: Locrian, Neapolitan minor, Ukrainian dorian, Double harmonic, and the Japanese Hirajoshi, In-sen and Iwato.

• Outrun — Aeolian minor at 120, octave bass, sixteenth arps, a saw lead.
• Night Drive — slower, halftime, minor pentatonic, long held chords.
• Darksynth — phrygian, power chords, a written bass riff and a gritty techno bassline.
• Dreamwave — lydian, major ninths, bells and a choir pad.
• Disco — harmonic minor, chords twice a bar, open hats on the off-beat.
• Synthpop — major and song-shaped, with chords that cadence.
• Cyberpunk — dorian over a pedal, a 909 and a punchy, gritty techno bassline.
• Horror Synth — Hungarian minor, a crawling semitone over a held bass note.
• Space Disco — mixolydian and bright, 1979 rather than 1986.
• Miami Nights — the sax record: major pentatonic, sevenths and ii–V turnarounds.
• Vaporwave — slow, drenched, in the major blues scale of the soul records it loops.

How a track is put together

Intro, verse, build, chorus, a second verse and chorus, a middle (breakdown, solo or bridge), a final chorus and an ending — the arp left running, a fade, or one hit and silence. Verse and chorus share their chords; what changes is how many parts play. Each track writes its own fader ride.

The chords come from the style, with a hint of jazz in most — ii–V–i turnarounds, tritone substitutes, dominant 9ths and 13ths. The hook is eight bars: a call and answer, then a response that reaches higher and lands home. It keeps its shape each time it returns over a new chord, swells toward its highest note, sighs onto held notes from the step above, and picks up a few grace notes — different in each chorus, most in the last; the final chorus is lifted an octave. The solo follows one of six plans — telling a story from the hook, a lick answered an octave up, a triplet build, a wail up top, a lick climbing a ladder, or a toned-down lyrical solo with no fast notes, sung by step (more likely in a subdued song) — with its own showpiece, climax and way home, shown as solo in the Chaos Engine readout. The arp picks its patterns, sound and phrase-end turnaround per track — and in the lighter styles it sometimes comps instead: open chords struck in a Charleston, off-beat or pushed rhythm. Cyberpunk and Darksynth also pick a drive setting, from clean to fuzz.

Chaos Engine

• ρ Lorenz — drives the melody's pitch and the hook's rhythm. Low settles, high leaps.
• Chaos ↔ Taste — 0 lets the learned policy pick every note, 1 hands it to the attractor.
• Temperature — low is greedy and repetitive, high explores.
• r Logistic — which steps the arp keeps, and where the drum ghost notes fall. Below 3.57 they repeat; toward 4.0 they never do.

The readout under the scope shows what this track picked.

Sounds

The polysynth has up to five detuned oscillators per voice and a resonant filter, and no two notes are quite in tune — which is what makes it sound analog. The FM engine does the bells, electric piano, brass and sax. The drum machines are a LinnDrum, an 808, a 909 and a Simmons, on a quartz-exact grid.

Channels

Each part runs through a preamp or amplifier, a tone stack and a speaker (studio monitor, guitar cabinet or car door). The pads, arp and lead are clean by default; the bass is split, clean below 145 Hz and driven above it for the midrange.

Effects

Sidechain pumps from every kick; Gated Room is the big snare reverb cut off dead; Chorus, Phaser and Width spread the synths; Tape, Hiss and Bit Crush are the cassette. The effects and hiss go silent when playback stops.

Keyboard & Sequencer

Both play any voice live through its own channel. The sequencer's Gate turns the same notes from an arpeggio into a pad.

Seeds

Every track comes from a seed. Close the lock (or type a seed) to keep it — the same seed rebuilds the identical track, so you can change the sound against an arrangement you like.

Master & exports

A plate, a hall reverb, a spring, a tempo-synced delay, a chorus, a tone sweep and the master level. MP3 and WAV render offline and deterministically — the same seed gives the same file — as a single file or separate instruments lined up for a DAW. MIDI writes one track per part, with the drums on channel 10.

Credits & licence

Created by: Wilfredo Bigol Jr

Contact

Licence

The music is yours. All generated and exported audio is released under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. You may copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.

The engine is not. The Chaos Engine — the generative system behind this app — is the intellectual property of Wilfredo Bigol Jr. Reproducing, distributing or modifying it, in whole or in part, without permission is prohibited.

There are no samples in this app: every sound is generated at runtime by the synth engines and drum machines, so there are no sample licences. Typefaces are Roboto Condensed and JetBrains Mono, self-hosted under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

MP3 encoding by LAME (lamejs 1.2.1), used under the LGPL-3.0 and kept as a separate, replaceable file.