Subswell is an effect and looper made from four effects that feed back into each other. You play boxes, and each box opens several of the paths between the effects at once. A brake pulls the feedback back before it runs away.
Five steps from opening Subswell to a sound feeding back on itself. It runs in Chrome, Edge and Safari, on a computer, an iPad or a phone.
Tabs and their drawer on the left, the boxes in the middle, the transport along the bottom. Everything on screen, numbered:
The tabs move above the boxes and run across the screen, and a drawer opens between them and the boxes. The scene browser and tame / wild get a row each. To save room, vol, the meters, the loop's length and the box count are left out (use your device's volume), and ⚄ is hidden below 900 px wide (the seeds bank in the scene list has one too). Everything else is the same.
Four effects feed each other. Sound comes in from the test tones, the mic or the looper and reaches four effects, one in each slot: space (a reverb), time (a delay, pitch or grains), heat (drive, ring or frequency shift) and wear (lo-fi, a resonator or blur). Every effect can send its output into any of the four, itself included. Those sixteen paths are the matrix, and the more of it is open, the more the sound feeds back on itself. The fx tab picks the effects; the engine tab shows the matrix.
You play boxes, not the matrix. Each box holds a hidden recipe: a few paths through the matrix, and sometimes a nudge to an effect's character or tone or to how tightly its loops repeat. Fill a box and it opens all of them together. Each path starts at its own point on the way up and takes from a fraction of a second to a few seconds to arrive, so one drag sets off a small chain of changes. Split a box and its recipe is shared between the halves; merge two and their recipes add up. The boxes has the gestures.
Every effect has a resting point. Each effect has four settings (size, tone, character and motion, under names that suit the effect). On the fx tab you set where they rest; the boxes, temper, tilt and wild push them away from there and they drift back when you let go. A ring on each slider shows where it has been pushed. Pin a setting to keep it where it rests.
The whole machine has its own controls. On mix, feed sets how much sound enters the effects and sustain how much the matrix feeds back; temper and tilt change the character and tone of all four at once. tame / wild, at the top, pushes all of that further in one move. Drift lets the machine change the boxes by itself.
It is built to get gnarly without hurting. Each effect has a soft ceiling, the output has a compressor and a clipper, and the brake rides the feedback down when it gets loud. When the machine runs hot, the box most responsible glows coral. Under all of that is a 60-second looper, and anything you record goes round the machine like the live sound.
Give Subswell sound, then play the boxes. Three ways in: the test tones, a mic or audio interface, and a file in the looper.
Choose them from source on the mix tab. Subswell starts on plucks.
Choose mic / interface. The browser asks permission the first time. Subswell takes the input as it is, with the browser's echo cancelling, noise reduction and automatic level all turned off, so set the level with in. The browser picks the input device: on a computer, choose it in the browser's site settings or your system's sound settings.
On the loop tab, load… puts an audio file into the looper. It becomes the loop, as if you had recorded it: it plays at once, and speed, reverse, dub and clear all work on it. So you hear only the file, the source switches to none.
The loop goes into the effects through feed and into the dry sound, alongside the live source, which keeps playing under it. Record something and set the source to none, and the loop is all you play the boxes with. With rec: output the looper records the machine itself, so you can print a sound and play it through another scene.
The middle of the screen. Every gesture works on the box under your finger; selecting a box brings up its controls.
How hard the box pushes. Empty, it does nothing; full, it opens its paths as far as its recipe goes. The full height of the box is the whole range.
Most sounds live in the bottom third. Small moves there are the most playable.Makes the box's level move up and down by itself, around where you filled it. Drag right for a wider swing. The faint band shows its range and a bright line shows where it is right now. At the top and bottom the movement folds back.
Brings up the box's controls in place of the transport. Tap it again, or done, to go back. The looper keeps running.
Splits the box in two, side by side or one above the other, whichever way it's longer. Its recipe is shared out between the halves, and both keep its fill. A box shakes when it can't split: it's too small (under about 128 px each way), or there are already 16 boxes.
Hold a box until it lifts (under half a second), then drag it onto another; the target shows a dashed outline. The box you dragged goes into the target: their recipes add up, the target takes the fuller of the two fills, and a neighbour takes the empty space.
While you hold a second finger on a box you're touching, it pushes almost as if it were full, two and a half times harder, and the whole matrix feeds back more. Let go and it falls back over a couple of seconds. On a computer, hold alt (option) as you click a box. The box shows a bright outline while you throw.
Short throws on the beat work like a dub engineer's send: a burst of feedback that rings out after you let go.Select a box and these take the transport's place, in the same space, so the boxes don't move. undo moves to the start of the row.
Halves the selected box's space and puts a new box, with a new recipe, in the other half, then selects it. New recipes are made to differ from the boxes you have.
The same as a double-tap, except the first half stays selected.
Then tap another box to merge the selected one into it, as the hold-and-drag gesture does. Tap merge again to change your mind.
Takes out the box's weakest path and softens any character or tone nudges a little. A box with one path left can't simplify.
Adds one path, choosing one that closes a new loop or reaches an effect the box didn't touch. Now and then it adds a character, tone or loop nudge instead. It stops at ten paths.
A new recipe for this box, different from the others. Its fill and wobble stay.
Records a fill movement and loops it. Tap tide (it reads draw a tide), then drag the box up and down; it reads recording… until you lift your finger, and from then on the box replays that movement by itself.
Touch a tided box to take over; it carries on when you let go. clear tide removes it. A tide can be up to about four and a half minutes long, and with box wobble synced (tempo & sync) its length snaps to 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 or 32 beats. Tides are saved in scenes.
Removes the box; a neighbour takes its space. The last box can't go.
How many boxes there are, out of 16. It also shows short messages, such as what to tap while merging.
Back to the transport.
How the level moves: a smooth swing, a straight up and down, a ramp up or down, a jump between two levels, a new random level each cycle (s&h), or a smooth glide between random levels that never repeats (wander).
How far the level swings, the same as dragging sideways on the box.
How fast it swings. The label over the slider shows the time of one cycle (31 s, 1.2 Hz). With box wobble synced to the tempo, it counts in bars and beats instead.
It sits at the end of the wobble row, but it isn't the wobble's depth: it scales everything the box does, at any fill. At 50% the box pushes half as hard; at 0 it does nothing. New boxes start at 100%, and some scenes turn a few down. The fill shows fainter as you lower it.
Turn a box's depth down to keep its recipe in reserve without deleting it.undo (in the bottom row) and the curved-arrow icon at the top both step back through the last 40 changes to the boxes and scenes: new, split, merge, simplify, grow, reroll, delete and changing scene. Undoing a box change leaves fills, wobbles, tides and the drawer sliders as they are; undoing a scene change brings the whole previous scene back. There's no redo. ⌘ Z (ctrl Z) does the same.
The recipes are hidden on purpose. To see one, turn on explain: ⋯ › explain · i overlays, or the i at the top of any drawer. Each box then shows a small map of its paths (four dots: space at the top, time on the right, heat at the bottom, wear on the left; a ring is an effect feeding itself), the family it came from (ring, chain, pair, star, self, fig8, sparse or merged), and its paths in words, strongest first. Small boxes show only the map. You can keep playing the boxes through it.
Along the bottom: the looper's buttons, freeze, and the meters. They stay here so you can play them in time. The looper's settings are on the loop tab.
Above them, until you select a box, is a line of reminders: tap to select · double-tap splits · up/down fills · sideways wobbles · hold & drag to merge · two fingers throws.
With the loop empty, rec starts recording (● rec) and a second tap closes the loop, which plays straight away. From then on the button reads dub: tap it to record over the loop (● dub) and again to stop.
While you dub, each pass lowers what's already there a little, so old layers fade as new ones go on. The loop is up to 60 s long; recording stops itself there.
Stops the loop; play starts it again from the top. Pressed while recording, it closes the loop like a second tap on rec.
Empties the loop. A loaded file can come back with reload.
Holds the last few seconds of everything you hear and keeps them sounding as a smooth bed, fading in over a moment, while the machine carries on above it. Every box's wobble stops while it's frozen. Tap again to let the bed fade out. Panic lets go of it too.
Freeze a moment you like, then change scene: the bed holds while the new boxes glide in.Where the loop is. The label beside it says empty, counts up while recording, then shows the state and the loop's length (play, dub or stop).
The scope draws what you hear. The short bar beside it is the brake: full and green when it's relaxed, shorter and amber or red while it's holding the feedback back. On a phone the meters are hidden.
Across the top: the one control for the whole machine's mood, undo, the scenes, volume, panic and ⋯.
How gnarly the whole machine is, in one move. Towards wild it raises feed, sustain and temper without moving their sliders (a ring on each on the mix tab shows where they've gone), makes every box push harder and wobble further, and gives every effect more character and motion. Towards tame it does the opposite. The safety chain stays as it is.
Leave the mix sliders where a scene puts them and play wild instead: one slider takes the whole scene calmer or rougher, and back.The same as undo in the bottom row.
Step back and forward through the factory scenes, then yours. The name (tidepool when Subswell opens, untitled for a scene without one) opens the scene list. ⚄ grows a new scene from two random words, such as salt lantern.
The output volume. Scenes don't change it. Hidden on a phone.
Silences the effects and the feedback for about a second, then lets them back in, and lets go of freeze. The dry sound and the loop keep playing.
Shows what each box does, and the short notes at the top of each drawer. See explain.
Opens a small panel:
There's no MIDI clock: the tempo is only what you type.
How the boxes draw their fill. clarity: the fill sits where you set it, and a bright line shows where the wobble has it now. liquid: the water itself rises and falls with the wobble, and its surface sloshes as the level moves; a small mark at the edge shows where you set it. The sound is the same.
Fades out everything but the water, which gets a little brighter; the sound carries on, tides and drift included. One tap anywhere, i or esc brings the controls back.
Opens this guide in a new tab.
The three intro screens again, or the card of recent changes.
Controls for the whole machine, its levels, and the sound going in. Each slider shows its value from 0 to 100 (in and wet go to 150); double-tap one to put it back. With tame / wild away from the middle, a ring on feed, sustain and temper shows where it has pushed them.
How much sound enters the four effects. At 0 nothing reaches them and you hear only the dry sound. The boxes decide what happens to it after that.
How much the matrix feeds back into itself: every open path is turned up together. Low, sounds die away; high, they ring on and build.
Sustain is where runaways come from. Raise it slowly and let the brake do its job.Changes the character of all four effects together: more grit, drive and crush, and bigger rooms and longer times, each arriving over a few seconds.
Lets the machine change the boxes by itself, every minute or so at low settings and every few seconds near the top. Mostly it glides a fill somewhere new or nudges a wobble; now and then it rerolls or grows a box, and it splits and merges to keep between three and seven boxes.
It never touches a box with a tide, the selected box, or anything while you're touching a box, and it doesn't fill up undo. The box it changed shows a pale outline for a moment.
Brightens all four effects as you raise it. It also sets a few of the paths and every effect's position in the stereo field slowly drifting, and above the middle it adds motion inside each effect. At 0 each effect sits at its own resting tone and nothing drifts.
The level of the live sound going into the machine and the dry mix. The mic isn't levelled for you, so this is where you set it. It doesn't change what the looper records.
The sound without effects, live and loop together, in what you hear.
The four effects' level in what you hear.
Holds the machine back while sound is coming in, and lets it bloom when you stop. The higher it is, the more the feedback and the effects duck under what you play.
With a mic or an instrument, breath keeps your playing clear and lets the tails fill the gaps.How hard the brake rides the feedback down when the machine gets loud, then lets it recover slowly. At 0 only the clipper and compressor are left to catch it; at 100 it can pull the feedback down to under a third. The bar beside the scope shows it working.
The live sound. See Playing it.
The four effects, one card per slot. Pick each slot's effect from the menu at the top of its card, and set where its four settings rest.
Each slider's thumb is where that setting rests. The boxes, temper, tilt and wild push it from there; a ring on the track shows where it is right now, with a tinted line back to the thumb, and disappears when the two agree. Double-tap a slider to put it back to the effect's own resting point.
Holds that setting where it rests. Nothing pushes it: not the boxes, temper, tilt or wild.
Pin a reverb's size or a delay's time to keep the space steady while everything else moves.Tunes the resonator. It shows only in the reson card, under its pitch. A scene can set it.
The looper's settings. Its buttons (rec, stop, clear) are in the transport, so you can play them in time.
Puts an audio file into the looper as the loop, and switches the source to none. The file's name shows beside it. See A file in the looper.
Puts the last file you loaded back in the looper, after a clear or a recording over it.
What the looper records. rec: input records the live source, before any effects. Tap it for rec: output, which records everything you hear, the whole machine included, so you can print a sound into the loop and dub over it with more of itself.
Plays the loop backwards. Scenes set it.
The loop's speed, and with it its pitch, like tape. It catches at ×0.25, ×0.50, ×1.00 and ×2.00 as you pass them. Scenes set it.
×0.50 turns a phrase into a slow, low pad: try it with the fogbank scene.How loud the loop is, into the effects and in the dry sound.
What the boxes are doing underneath: who feeds whom, and where every setting sits right now. Nothing here changes the sound; it's for looking.
The matrix as a grid. Each row's effect sends into each column's: the cell fills with the send level and shows it as a number, with the short delay on that path underneath (27 ms). Dashed cells are an effect feeding itself. Rows and columns are named by slot and effect.
The last column: each effect's output level.
How much of the incoming sound reaches each effect. feed sets it.
One card per slot, with its four settings and its pan. The bar is the live value and the small tick is where it rests; the number is the live value out of 100. Pan reads L or R.
How hard the brake is working right now.
How far breath is holding the machine back right now.
A scene is a whole setup: the boxes and their recipes, fills and wobbles, the effects with their resting points and pins, and the machine's settings. There are 22 factory scenes in three banks, calm, rough and strange; scenes you grow from a word go in seeds, and the ones you save go in yours.
| Bank | Scenes |
|---|---|
| calm | tidepool, sounding, pressure, slack, kelp, lagoon, mooring, lantern, fogbank |
| rough | silt, brine, wreck, rust, bilge, riptide, breach, maelstrom |
| strange | sonar, whalefall, angler, abyss, siren |
Calm scenes have fewer, emptier boxes and gentle wobbles; rough ones have more boxes, fuller fills and more temper; strange ones lean on the resonator, ring and pitch effects. fogbank is built to turn a loop into a smeared pad: it sets the loop to ×0.50 and the brake to 50.
How long a change of scene takes. The old boxes fade out underneath the new ones while the machine's settings drift across. At cut it changes at once.
A long glide between two scenes is a slow transition you can play over.In the seeds bank, type any word or phrase and press grow (or return): the same word always grows the same scene, on any device. ⚄ beside it picks two random words. The bank lists the last 12 seeds you've grown in this session; save one to keep it.
Type a name under save current scene and press save. Saving with the same name again overwrites it; ✕ beside a saved scene deletes it. Factory names are taken. You can keep up to 500.
A scene sets the boxes (recipes, fills, depth, wobbles and tides), the four effects with their resting points and pins, the key, feed, sustain, temper and tilt, the loop's speed and reverse, and the brake. A scene you save also keeps tame / wild, drift, dry, wet, breath and the tempo settings; factory and seeded scenes leave those as they are (fogbank also sets wild and the levels).
A scene never changes the volume, in, the loop's level, the source, or what's in the looper: the loop's audio isn't saved.
Copies the current scene as a line of text starting SW1.. Paste it into a message, a note, anywhere. If the browser won't copy, the code appears in a box for you to copy by hand.
Opens a box: paste a code and press load code. The scene is called pasted until you save it.
Saves all your scenes as subswell-scenes.json, or the current scene if you haven't saved any.
Adds the scenes from a file. Ones with the same name are replaced; any that can't be read are skipped, and Subswell says how many.
Saves every scene you've saved as one file, subswell-scenes-backup- and the date. Keep it somewhere safe, or send it on. It says nothing saved yet if there's nothing to save.
Opens a file picker: choose a backup and its scenes come back under their own names. A scene you already have is skipped; one with the same name but a different sound is added as name 2, and a factory name is skipped. You can keep 500 scenes: once the library is full, the rest aren't added and Subswell says how many. A file that isn't a Subswell backup is refused and nothing changes.
Starting points. Each one says where to begin.
The phrase turns into a low, smeared bed. For a still version, open fx and push blur's smear to the top.
Each throw bursts into feedback and rings out after you let go. Set breath to 50 to keep the plucks clear between throws.
The tided box keeps its movement while drift changes the others every half minute or so. Raise drift for faster change.
The noise bursts ring at an A, with its fifth and octaves above it. Unpin pitch and raise temper, and the note climbs through the Ds and As of the key.
The rough recording plays through a calm machine. Press dub to layer the result over itself.
The same word grows the same scene anywhere, so a word is a scene you can share without a code.
Double-tap a slider on mix, loop or fx, or tame / wild or vol, to put it back.
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
| [ ] | previous, next scene |
| r | grow a random scene |
| ⌘ Z or ctrl Z | undo |
| i | hide ui, show it again |
| alt + click a box | throw (a second finger, with a mouse) |
| esc | close a popover or menu, then leave hide ui, then panic |
There's no key for the looper: its buttons are played on screen. In this guide, / jumps to find.
An iPad version of Subswell is planned. Until it's out, Subswell runs in Safari or Chrome on an iPad from the website, with everything in this guide, including the mic. See Tips and limits for what's different in a browser.
Tap begin: browsers stay silent until you do. Check vol at the top, your device's volume and, on an iPhone, the silent switch. On mix, check that source isn't none with an empty loop, and that in, dry and wet aren't at 0.
If you hear the dry sound but no effects, fill a box: empty boxes send nothing between the effects, and with feed at 0 nothing reaches them.
Press panic or esc, then pull down the box that's glowing coral. Lower sustain or move tame / wild towards tame, and keep brake at 70 or above. If you're on the mic with speakers, the howl may be the mic hearing the speakers: use headphones.
Subswell needs the site over https (or localhost) for the mic, and your permission. If a message says the mic is unavailable, the source goes back to what was playing: allow the mic in the browser's site settings, then choose mic / interface again. If it's working but quiet, raise in.
That's wobble on a box, a tide, drift (mix), or tilt setting the paths drifting (at 0 they stay still). Set drift to off, drag sideways to the left on a box to stop its wobble, and clear any tides (boxes marked ≈). freeze also holds every wobble still.
It's too small to split, or there are already 16 boxes. Merge or delete a few, or split a bigger box.
They live in the browser and device you saved them in: another browser, a private window or clearing site data won't have them. back up scenes in ⋯ keeps a copy and restore scenes… brings them back.
Not to a file. rec: output records the whole machine into the loop, so you can build on it inside Subswell. To keep it, record your device's output with another app.
A file over 100 MB is refused, and a format the browser can't read shows Could not decode that file. Try a WAV or MP3. Only the first 60 s is used.
Once it has loaded, it doesn't need the internet: nothing is sent anywhere, and it makes no network requests.
Something missing or wrong? Email support@tinkerhaus.xyz, or see support.
Subswell shares its four effects and its feedback engine with its sister app, Superswell (its guide), which lays every send out in plain view.