Thrum

Thrum turns a Launchpad X into a drone organ. All eighty-one pads are live, mapped across eight timbres and eight historical temperaments, with a feedback-delay-network reverb and a jawari buzz stage at the end of the chain.

The idea the whole instrument rests on is detuning in hertz, not cents. A fixed cent offset produces a beat rate that changes with pitch; a fixed hertz offset holds the beat rate steady across the keyboard, so a chord an octave up shimmers at exactly the same speed as the one below it. That single decision is what makes long tones sit still instead of drifting.

What it grew into

• Pulse — tap tempo driving four polyrhythmic arpeggiators
• Spatial — sixteen HRTF busses with AirPods head tracking, route-aware since 1.4.0
• Flow — a self-playing director that picks a fresh key each session

There is an iOS and iPadOS companion, ThrumFlow, that pairs Flow with a Metal field visualisation, plus a CarPlay build that draws the live field as artwork.