I’ve always loved the sound of ambient synthesizers — lush pads, shimmering arpeggios, the kind of textures you hear in Stranger Things or Brian Eno records. I also own a Korg Monologue and have recently become a little obsessed with the Hologram Electronics Microcosm.
So I decided to see if I could build my own.
Not with hardware. Not with a DAW. With Claude, in a browser.
The result is DR-01 — a fully playable ambient synthesizer that runs entirely in a web browser using the Web Audio API. No plugins, no installs, no backend. Just one HTML file.
It has two independent sound layers: a chord layer with seven pads mapped to scale degrees, and a note layer for expressive melodies where dragging your finger adjusts the filter in real time.
There’s an arpeggiator with multiple patterns and octave range control, a drone mode that lets you stack sustained chords on top of each other, and a looper for building up layers live.
The sound engine has saw, pulse, sine, and triangle oscillators with unison and detune, a resonant filter with envelope and LFO modulation, and an effects section with shimmer-delay, granular, microloop, mosaic, and glitch modes — plus a reverb with optional shimmer.
There are presets like Deep Pad, Frozen, Crystal, Void, and Upside Down that completely reshape the character of the instrument.
The whole thing was built in a single conversation.
I’d describe what I wanted, Claude would write the code, and we’d iterate — adjusting the UI, fixing bugs, adding features.
The chord quantisation (so chord changes snap to the beat during arpeggios) came from me struggling to get smooth transitions while playing live. The drone mode came from wanting to layer sustained textures underneath the arp. Every feature grew out of actually playing the thing.
What surprised me most is how playable it feels. This isn’t a toy or a demo. You can sit with it for twenty minutes and make something genuinely beautiful.
The era of musicians building their own instruments is here.
You don’t need to know DSP theory or spend months learning a framework.
You just need a clear idea of the sound you want and a willingness to iterate. The tools will meet you where you are.
Try it yourself: jamiemarsland.github.io/dr-01
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