Tiny Acid Jam

A little acid box that fits in your hand. Five machines live on one colour-cartridge nav strip — two TB-303 lines, a TR-808 and a TR-909 drum machine, plus a master panel — and they all run on one transport. Tap a cartridge to focus it; tap its LED to mute it from anywhere. Squelchy acid line, glides, accents, ties, the whole lot, and a Devil Fish mod you can flip on and off.

Have a play

(Sound needs a tap first, since browsers block audio until you click. If it misbehaves in the little frame, open it fullscreen.)

How it works

Every voice is honest. The 303s, the 808 and the 909 are the same code the standalone dreamengine instruments use, shared from the engine so they can't quietly drift apart. Each 303 face has the classic knobs — cutoff, resonance, envelope, decay, accent, riding a real diode-ladder filter — and a hidden Devil Fish page with a sub-osc, a second decay, slide time and filter tracking.

You build patterns right on the little green screen: arm a flag — note, accent, slide, tie, octave — and paint it onto the sixteen note-bars. Drag a bar up or down to pitch it, snapped to a minor-pentatonic so whatever you do stays musical. Program the 808 and the 909, add swing, distortion and reverb sends, and ride the master panel for the filter, the PCF, or a bit of bitcrush and gate on the way to the drop. Or just hit GEN and let it invent a line for you.

Where it came from

It began as a single screen inside a bigger "acid rack" experiment. This is that screen becoming its own thing — a pocket acid house machine for when the mood strikes, no mic, no gear, no accounts. It's also out as a proper app: Tiny Acid Jam on the App Store, the same groovebox, in your actual pocket. The web version here is the whole thing to mess about with in the browser first.