Canvas is an ambient instrument that turns sounds into pads on paper, where they play off each other. Add a recording, the mic or a sound from a bank, and drag the pads and the red listener to change what you hear.
Five steps from opening Canvas to a sound you like. It runs in a browser on a computer or an iPad.
The paper fills the screen. The header runs along the top, the tabs down the left, and the open tab's drawer sits over the paper. Everything on screen, numbered:
The tabs move to the bottom and the drawer slides up from there, under the paper. Everything else is the same, except the dials: in a window narrower or shorter than about 560 px (a phone) they and the tweak button aren't shown, so the paper keeps its room; the same controls are in the interplay and fx tabs. Canvas keeps the same sound whichever way round the screen is: only the picture changes.
Each sound is a pad. Canvas takes a moment from a sound and holds it as a pad: stretched into a wash, frozen, broken into grains, played as a tape loop or swelled backwards. Each of those is a territory, and a pad can sit anywhere between them. Up to six pads share the paper.
Where you put things is the mix. The red listener is where you hear from. The further a pad is from it, the quieter it gets and the more of it goes into the hall; left and right of it sets the pan. focus sets how far the listener hears. No pad ever drops into silence, however far away it is.
Close pads play off each other. How they do it is the mode on interplay: they take turns to swell, swell on loops of their own, share out the frequency bands, or borrow moments from each other's sounds. The closer two pads are, the more they affect each other.
Pads keep moving on. Every so often a pad re-captures: it takes a new moment from its sound and fades it in. It can roam through the sound, or stay on a moment you choose on its waveform. Pads can also wander on the paper, follow a move you record, or be moved by the three slow mods on mod.
The canvas can age. Press play on degrade and every sound slowly wears like an old tape loop, on one clock for the whole canvas. Shared tape delay, hall and grain cloud effects are on fx.
Everything on the paper can be dragged, and most of what you see is the sound at work.
The red point in a thin ring is where you hear from. Drag it anywhere. Distance from it sets each pad's level and how much hall it gets (far pads are quieter and wetter, by up to about 18 dB); a pad to its left is panned left. The dotted ring around it shows its focus: how far it hears. Mods can move it (mod, destinations listener x and listener y), and so can a recorded move.
A pad can wander around its home, shown as a small circle with a dotted line to where the pad is now. Set it on the pad's movement page. A pad or the listener can also loop a move you record:
❚❚ pause moves (p) holds every recorded move where it is, so a moving pad is easy to tap; ▶ play moves sets them going again. It sits in the mod tab, in the listener move row beside ● record and clear, and appears once there's a move to pause. Press esc to cancel a move you've armed but not started.
Press i (or ⋯ › hide ui) to hide everything but the paper. The sound carries on, and you can still drag pads and the listener and record moves; taps don't open anything. Touch with two fingers, press i or esc, or tap the ⋯ in the corner to bring the controls back.
The four modes are four ways for pads to play off each other. Pick one at the top of interplay, or press 1 to 4. In every mode, pads only affect pads near them, and interplay sets how strongly. A fresh patch starts with interplay at 0, so turn it up before you listen for the modes.
Each pad swells and falls back on its own slow urge, and when one swells, the pads near it yield. Close pads take turns rather than piling up. The urges come every 12 to 60 s or so, never quite repeating; pace speeds them up or slows them down.
Put two pads almost on top of each other and turn interplay up to hear them hand over.Each pad swells and fades on a loop of its own, 7 to 30 s long, so the pads drift in and out of step. Neighbours pull each other's timing. At the end of each loop a pad re-captures a new moment, so every time round is a little different. The ink arc round each pad shows where it is in its loop.
With loops set to sync, each loop rounds to whole bars of the bpm and re-captures land on bar lines; neighbours stop pulling.
Close pads compete for frequency bands. Where two overlap, the louder takes the band and the other thins out there, so a crowded patch of paper stays clear instead of muddy. A pad that has lost bands looks paler.
When a pad re-captures, it may take its new moment from a nearby pad's sound instead of its own, so a choir can briefly sing with a bell's timbre. Closer pads and higher interplay make it more likely. Pads re-capture a little more often in this mode.
Worn tape travels with the sound: a pad that borrows from a worn neighbour plays its holes too.Canvas plays itself once there are pads on the paper. You play it by choosing sounds, placing them, and moving things. Each sound comes from one of four places.
Open pads and pick a bank on the left, then a sound on the right; or tap the paper and choose sound bank, and the next sound you pick lands where you tapped. The demos bank holds four sounds made inside Canvas (glass, rain, choir, bells); the other banks are loaded from the website. Bank sounds come back when you reopen Canvas.
file… opens a file picker (you can choose several). On a computer you can also drop audio files straight onto the paper, and each lands where you drop it. A file can be up to 10 minutes long; Canvas keeps the first 3 minutes, in mono. A new file starts as a clean loop: the whole sound at normal speed, on a loop, with no effects.
Tap ● mic, make your sound, and tap ■ stop. A take lasts up to 60 s. The canvas pauses while the mic is open, so the take is only the room, and picks up where it was afterwards. A take you start from the paper turns into a stop button where you tapped, and the new pad lands there.
The same, but it records the canvas's own output, effects and all, into a new pad. It needs at least one pad to listen to. Resample a few pads into one, then start again from that.
The buttons along the top, and the few at the bottom of the paper.
Pauses all the sound with a short fade and holds everything where it is: the pads, the effect tails and the clocks. Play picks up from there.
Records what you hear, in stereo with the effects and the volume, to a WAV file. It doesn't pause the canvas or make a pad. While it runs, the button reads ■ stop audio and a timer counts up to 10:00.
When you stop, the timer shows the take's length. Where the browser can ask where to save (Chrome and Edge on a computer), the button reads save WAV…: pick a place and the take clears once it's saved; cancel and it's kept. Elsewhere it reads download WAV and the file goes wherever your browser puts downloads. The take stays after a download, so you can try again; tap discard when you're done. A take you haven't saved is lost when the page reloads.
Clears every pad and puts the mode, bpm, interplay, fx, degrade and mod settings back to how they start. It also unlocks every slider, moves the listener to the middle and sets the age back to new. Your volume stays. One undo brings back the pads and settings, but not the age.
Moves every pad to a new place and rolls new values for the interplay and fx sliders, and gives each pad a new wear pattern. It leaves the returns, transpose, degrade and anything you've locked alone. The seed code at the top right of the paper changes with each scatter.
Tap a slider's name to lock it before you scatter; tap again to unlock.The curved arrows step back and forward through your changes: pads added, moved or removed, settings, scenes loaded, scatter and fresh. The degrade age and the header's play / pause aren't undone.
The master clock. Anything you set to sync follows it: mods, a pad's wander and recorded moves, the listener's move, phase loops and the degrade clock. Everything starts free, so the bpm only matters once you sync something. It's saved with a scene.
The output volume. Scenes, fresh and scatter leave it alone.
The round red button. Silences everything and clears the delay, hall and cloud tails, then fades the pads back in. esc closes whatever is open first, and panics only when nothing is.
Arms a recording: the next pad or listener you drag records its path, which then loops. See moving by themselves.
Six dials above the buttons: interplay, blur, drift, focus, pace and far send. They are the same controls as in the tabs, so turning one moves its slider. Drag a dial up or right to turn it up, down or left to turn it down; double-tap it for its starting value, or focus it and use the arrow keys (⇧ for small steps). The tweak button, at the bottom right of the paper, shows them and goes while they show; the ✕ at the strip's corner hides them again, and ⋯ › hide tweak. Whether they're showing is remembered, and isn't part of a scene. Hide ui takes them away too.
Holds every recorded move still, so a pad is easy to catch. It lives in the mod tab, in the listener move row beside ● record and clear, and shows once there is a move. It isn't saved and isn't undone.
Appears while a mic take or resample is running, with the seconds so far. Tap it to finish the take.
Your sounds, and where you add new ones. Tap a pad's name (or the pad on the paper) to open its settings.
Opens its settings. The coloured dot is its colour on the paper. A word after the name says if its sound is loading, missing or unavailable; an unavailable bank sound has a retry button.
Silences the pad; it reads unmute to bring it back. A muted pad still sits on the paper.
Plays only the soloed pads. You can solo several at once; mute wins over solo.
Removes the pad. Undo brings it back.
Banks on the left, the bank's sounds on the right. Tap a sound to add it. So far there are soft tones (Slow bloom, Glass pulse), soft textures (Filtered rain, Wind wash) and the built-in demos.
Adds one pad per audio file you choose. See files.
Records a take of up to 60 s into a new pad. See mic.
Records the canvas's output into a new pad. See resample.
Canvas holds six pads at most. A seventh is refused with a short message.
Everything about one pad, inside the pads drawer, on three pages: sound, mix and movement. Canvas remembers which page you were on as you go from pad to pad.
The arrows step to the previous or next pad. The name opens a list of every pad, each with mute and solo. Tap the pads heading at the top of the drawer to go back to the list.
The pad's whole sound. Tap or drag to choose the moment it plays from (the red marker): when you let go it re-captures from there and switches to stay, so later re-captures come back to it. The shaded part is the loop that plays from the moment, span long, and the black line is where it's reading now.
Drag the handle at the end of the shaded loop (its tab is at the bottom) to set the loop's length. It can wrap past the end of the sound. Near the marker, only the lower half of the waveform grabs the handle.
Dotted lines are older moments still sounding as layers. On worn tape the bars go pale and short.
Re-captures now. With roam it takes a fresh moment; with stay it reads repeat moment and starts again from yours.
Each re-capture picks a new moment in the sound. It goes for lively spots over silent ones.
Each re-capture comes back to the moment you chose on the waveform.
Plays the whole sound at normal speed on a loop, with its fx sends and wander at 0. Files, mic takes and resamples start this way. Choosing a territory, or moving any slider on the sound page or under layers, leaves it; tap it again to come back.
A sound that doesn't loop smoothly clicks at its join in a clean loop; a territory hides it.Five ways for a pad to hold its sound. A tap sets all the pad's sound settings for that territory; the slider underneath slides smoothly between neighbours. After that, move any setting on its own; the tiles' shading shows how close you still are.
How big a piece of sound each grain or frame takes. Small sizes keep detail and rhythm; large ones blur it into a smoother wash.
How fast the pad moves through its loop. ×1 is normal speed, the middle is frozen, and below it plays backwards.
How long the loop is, from the moment. Short spans repeat a fragment; long ones travel through the sound. The same as dragging the waveform's handle.
Blends between the sound's real grains (0) and the smeared stretch (100). The middle has some of both.
How far ahead of the read point each grain or frame can jump, up to the whole loop. More spray is more diffuse; at 0 it reads exactly at the read point. The global blur scales it, so with blur at 0 spray does nothing.
Tilts the pad darker or brighter.
A fixed tape character: duller highs, a little saturation and, on grains, wow and flutter. It doesn't change over time; for tape that ages, see degrade.
Moves the pad's pitch, without changing its speed.
Sends more grains an octave or a fifth up or down.
The note tune rings at.
Rings the pad at the harmonics of its note and pushes down what's in between, so a noisy sound starts to sing a pitch. It works on the stretch side of the sound, so on a pad that's mostly grains it's greyed, with a note saying why.
Tune two pads a fifth apart, then use transpose to move them together.Pitch follows speed, like tape: half speed is an octave down.
How long each backwards phrase lasts. A piano or bell note becomes a crescendo into its attack.
How each phrase ends: fading out softly before the attack (diffuse), or landing on it clearly (exposed).
Time between swells, as a share of swell. Below 100% they overlap; above, there's a gap.
In reverse, tapping the waveform chooses the arrival: the phrase starts in the sound right after it and reads backwards into it. Roam picks a new strike for each phrase; stay repeats yours. Reverse has no loop handle (its length is swell), and the texture sliders, spread and varispeed are dimmed because they don't apply. The reverse sliders are dimmed in the other territories.
The pad's own volume, on top of Canvas's balancing and the listener's distance.
Adds to the pan the pad gets from sitting left or right of the listener. All the way over overrides its place.
How much of the pad goes to the shared tape delay.
How much goes to the hall, on top of what distance adds.
How much goes to the grain cloud.
Give each pad a different space: one dry, one in the tape, one lost in the cloud.How fast the pad wanders. Synced, it's one turn every division of the bpm.
How far it wanders from home (or, with spray, how much its spray moves).
x / y wanders around its home on the paper. spray keeps it still and moves its spray instead. recorded plays a move you recorded; choosing it with no move yet arms a recording.
Free, or locked to the bpm. Wander and the recorded move each keep their own choice. A synced recorded move loops over a whole number of beats, from 1 beat to 64 bars, nearest to its length.
● record arms a move for this pad only (● now drag it); drag the pad on the paper. clear removes the move. The note says how long it is.
With a recorded move: how fast it plays back.
With a recorded move: how big it is, around home. 200% doubles it.
With 1, a re-capture crossfades to the new moment. With more, the old moment keeps sounding as a held layer underneath while the new one fades in, so moments stack up.
How long a new moment takes to fade in.
How long a held layer takes to fade away. At the top it holds forever.
On sliders in the drawer: drag (hold shift for fine), double-tap to put one back, or use the arrow keys. Scrolling up and down scrolls the drawer; hold shift or scroll sideways to nudge a slider. On touch, swipe up and down to scroll and sideways to set a value.
How the pads affect each other, and the settings every pad shares.
How the pads play off each other. The line under the buttons says what the mode does. All four are in how pads meet.
Applies in phase mode; in the other modes it changes nothing. free: loops of 7 to 30 s that neighbours pull. sync: loops of whole bars, re-capturing on bar lines.
Scales every pad's spray. At 50 each pad's spray is as set and at 100 it's doubled. At 0 there's none, so each pad reads exactly at its read point (unless its movement is set to spray).
How strongly nearby pads affect each other, in every mode. At 0, they ignore each other. A fresh patch starts at 0 (with blur, drift and far send at 0 too); the scenes set their own.
The speed of breathing and of phase loops.
How often pads re-capture a new moment by themselves: about every 90 s at 0, every 8 s at 100, each pad on its own timing. (In phase mode, pads re-capture at the end of each loop instead.)
How far the listener hears: the dotted ring around it. Low focus lets far pads fall away within a short distance; high focus brings the whole paper in.
Every slider here except transpose can be locked against scatter: tap its name.
Slow modulators that can move almost any interplay, fx or degrade slider, or the listener: three to start, up to six. Then a move you record for the listener.
When a mod is on, the slider it moves shows a ring where its value is right now, and the tab gets a dot for each mod that's running.
Off keeps its settings, so you can hear a scene with and without it. All three start off.
∿ sine, ⋀ tri, ⟋ saw ↑, ⟍ saw ↓, ⊓ square (flips between two values), ⁘ s&h (a new random value each cycle) and 〰 wander (glides between random values, never repeating).
What it moves: listener x or listener y, any interplay slider, the hall, tape and cloud sliders, or degrade's worn in and intensity. none parks it.
Send one mod to listener x and another, slower, to listener y and the listener walks the paper by itself.Locks the mod to the bpm; rate becomes division.
What happens when the mod would push a slider past its end: fold bounces back, clamp stops there.
How fast it cycles, when free. 0.005 Hz is once every 200 s.
The length of one cycle, when synced.
How far it moves the slider, either way round. The number at the top right of the row is the mod's output now.
Removes the mod. There's always at least one.
Adds a mod under the others, already on and pointed at something no other mod is moving. At six it greys out.
Sends every mod somewhere new: a new shape, rate (or division), depth, fold and destination for each, most of them on and no two on the same slider. It keeps the number of mods, leaves degrade alone, and is one undo.
A quick way to find a moving scene: randomise, listen for a while, and undo if it isn't working.● record arms a move for the listener (● now drag the listener); drag it on the paper and let go. clear removes it. Mods on listener x and y add on top of the move.
Free, or looped over a whole number of beats of the bpm.
How fast the listener's move plays back.
How big the move is, around where the listener started.
Three effects that every pad shares. Each pad sets how much it sends to them on its mix page. Tape and cloud also feed the hall a little, so everything sits in one space.
The delay time. Echoes bounce between left and right.
How many times it repeats. Each repeat gets darker.
Dark to bright repeats.
Tape wow and flutter: the echoes' pitch wobbles.
How loud the tape comes back.
The size of the hall.
Extra hall for pads far from the listener, on top of each pad's own send. At 0, far pads are only quieter, not wetter.
How long the hall rings.
Dark to bright.
Feeds the hall back an octave up, so its tail climbs.
How loud the hall comes back.
Grains per second, scattered from the last few seconds of what's sent to it.
How long each grain is.
How many grains jump an octave, or a fifth, up or down.
How loud the cloud comes back.
Scatter rolls every fx slider except the three returns. Lock any of them by tapping its name.
The whole canvas ages on one clock, like old tape loops. Press play and leave it.
How far the canvas has aged. It moves by itself while the clock plays. Drag it back to make the canvas younger, or forward to jump ahead; double-tap it for new tape.
Runs or stops the ageing. The line under it says how long until the frailest pad is fully worn. The tab shows a dot while the clock plays.
Starts again on new tape: age back to new.
Counts the speed in time, or in bars of the bpm.
How long the clock takes to wear out a pad of fragility 100%. Less fragile pads take longer.
How hard the wear bites. 100% is the tuned character; at 0 the tape stays clean however old it is.
How fast each pad ages, named after the pad. At 0 it never ages.
Keep one pad at 0 as an anchor while the rest fall apart around it.As a pad ages its sound smears, wobbles, squashes, gets gritty and loses its top and bottom. Then the tape wears through in patches: the holes fill with a dark drone made from the loop itself, and the hall rises into the gaps. Some of the tape always survives, so a fully worn pad still plays.
A scene is a whole canvas: its pads, where they sit, every setting, the mods, the listener, the seed and the age. Ten factory scenes use the demo sounds; your own go in yours.
| Scene | What you hear |
|---|---|
| first wash | The four demos, each in a different territory. |
| reverse blooms | Bells swell backwards into their attack, over a dark glass pad. |
| frozen choir | Choir, glass and bells held in layers, in a long hall with shimmer. |
| rain grains | Grains in pollinate mode, taking moments from each other. |
| tape garden | Four tape loops in phase mode, each on its own cycle. |
| glass cathedral | Spectral mode in a big hall: the pads share out the bands. |
| bell orbit | Two slow mods walk the listener between four wandering pads. |
| low tide | Every pad an octave or two down, in slow phase mode. |
| static radio | Worn tape and fast grains in pollinate mode. |
| old reel | Starts a little worn, with the degrade clock playing. |
Type a name under save this scene and press save. Saving with a name you already have overwrites it; ✕ deletes one (after asking). Saving under a factory name adds (mine).
The canvas you're working on is also kept between visits, so a reload brings it back. fresh patch is the empty canvas.
Saves every scene you've saved as one file, canvas-scenes-backup- and the date. The number beside it in ⋯ is how many. With none saved, it says so and writes nothing. A scene that can't be read is left out of the file, and a second message says how many. A scene keeps file, mic and resample pads by name only, so those still come back as missing.
Back up before you clear a browser's data, and keep the file somewhere safe.Opens a file picker for a backup. A scene that is already there is skipped. A scene with the same name but different settings is added as name 2, so nothing of yours is overwritten. A scene whose name exactly matches a factory one is skipped. A file that isn't a Canvas backup is refused and nothing changes.
Starting points. Begin from fresh patch (press fresh) unless it says otherwise.
You hear your recording slowed to a soft wash that moves to a new part of it every minute or so. For held moments that stack up instead, tap infinite and set hold to ∞.
As one swells, the other backs off, and the coloured line between them shows who's pushing. Drag them apart and they stop taking turns.
Each strike gathers out of nothing into its attack, with a short breath between. Tap roam to have every swell arrive on a different strike.
The listener drifts round the paper and each pad comes forward as it passes. Raise focus to hear more of the paper at once.
Each pad's loop is now a whole number of bars, so every new moment arrives on a bar line. Set loops back to free to let them drift apart again.
Bells go first, then glass, while the choir holds steady underneath. Drag age back at any point to hear it younger.
Keys don't work while you're typing a scene name, or while the intro is open.
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
| 1 … 4 | mode: breathe, phase, spectral, pollinate |
| space | play or pause |
| c | re-capture every pad |
| g | record a move |
| p | pause or play recorded moves |
| r | scatter |
| [ ] | previous, next scene |
| ⌘Z ⇧⌘Z | undo, redo (Ctrl on Windows) |
| i | hide ui, show it again |
| esc | close a menu, then disarm a move or close the drawer, then leave hide ui, then panic |
In this guide, / jumps to find.
An iPad version of Canvas is planned. Until then, play the web version in Safari on the iPad: everything in this guide applies, and the notes in in a browser and tips and limits cover what's different.
Tap begin (or any key): browsers stay silent until you do. Canvas starts on an empty fresh patch, so add a sound or load a scene with ›. Then check the header button reads ❚❚ pause (it's playing), vol is up, no pad is muted and nothing is soloed, and your device's volume and silent switch. While a mic take is running the canvas is paused on purpose.
Its sound was a file, a mic take or a resample, and those aren't kept between visits. Remove the pad and add the file again. Pads from the sound banks and the demos always come back.
The mic needs a secure page, so use Canvas on the website, not a copy opened from your disk. Allow the mic when the browser asks; if you said no, allow it in the site settings and reload. A mic take can't start while ● record audio is running.
It's probably far from the listener: drag it closer, or turn focus up. In breathe mode it may be yielding to a neighbour. Or turn up its level.
That's re-capturing: drift sets how often, and in phase mode each loop ends with one. To keep a pad on one moment, tap its waveform (it switches to stay) or set drift to 0. Mods, wander and recorded moves move things too.
The degrade clock is playing. Press pause on degrade, then restore for new tape, or drag age back. Set a pad's fragility to 0 to stop it ageing.
They don't affect this pad as it is. tune and note only work on the stretch side of a sound, the reverse sliders only in reverse, and in full reverse the texture sliders step back.
Tap ● record audio in the header, play, then stop and save the WAV. It records the stereo output with the effects, up to 10 minutes.
They're stored in the browser you made them in, so they won't appear in another browser, a private window or another device, and clearing site data removes them. Back up scenes (in ⋯) keeps a copy, and restore scenes… brings them back.
Once it has loaded, yes, with the demos and any files you add. The other sound banks come from the website. Nothing you play or record is sent anywhere.
Something missing or wrong? Email support@tinkerhaus.xyz, or see support.
Phase mode is inspired by tape loops of different lengths drifting in and out of step. The tape delay and hall are shared with Murmur8, another Tinkerhaus synth.
The sounds in the banks are original sounds made for Canvas, released under CC0.