ChilledDVS DAW

01Getting started

Open chilleddvs.com/daw. There is nothing to install, no account, and nothing to pay for. It works in any current Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari on a desktop or laptop. The layout adapts to a phone, and the step grids scroll horizontally. A mouse is still best for piano-roll editing, waveform chopping and drag-to-reorder controls.

Browsers will not make sound until you interact with the page, so the first click on Play is what starts the audio engine. If the very first bar sounds thin, that is the engine warming up, not a fault.

Make something in five minutes

Pick a starting point In Compose, open Pattern library and click a genre — Neurofunk, Jungle, Liquid. It fills the drum rows and sets the tempo and swing to match.
Press play Spacebar works too. You are hearing the pattern loop.
Add a bassline In the Sub piano roll, click to draw notes. Drag them around, drag the right edge to make them longer.
Load a break Choose Sample & sound, then Load into slot 1 and Snap to hits. Return to Compose and click cells in the slot's slice lane to place chops.
Build the track Make more patterns, drop them into the arrangement with repeat counts, switch to song mode, balance your levels in Mix, then choose Export WAV.

02The layout

The buttons below the transport choose which tools you see. The studio opens in Compose. Switching workspaces keeps your project and playback in place; it does not change the playback mode.

Workspace	Tools
01 Compose	Pattern library, Play in, drum grid, piano rolls, slice lanes and automation. Song automation appears in song mode.
02 Sample & sound	Eight sample slots, waveform chopping, per-slice settings, drum kit and lead synth.
03 Mix	Channel levels, EQ, sends, effects, sidechain and the master chain.
All panels	All of these tools together on one page.

The guide, transport and Arrangement panel remain available in every workspace. The Arrangement panel contains the pattern / song / live playback modes and the pattern bank. The clip grid appears when you select live mode.

The transport stays at the top while you scroll on wider screens. On phones it scrolls with the page to leave room for editing.

03Transport

Control	Notes
Play / Stop	Spacebar does the same when focus is on the page. Focused buttons, links, menus and input fields keep their normal keyboard behavior. Holding Space does not repeatedly toggle playback.
Position	`bar . beat . 16th`, then the total length of whatever is playing.
BPM	Type any tempo, decimals included. No genre cap — 40 and 400 are both fine. `−` and `+` nudge by one.
Tap	Tap four beats and it sets the tempo from your timing.
Swing	0–60%. Delays every second 1/16, which is the classic shuffle. It applies to 1/16 pairs even though the grid stores 1/32.
Loop	Off means playback stops at the end instead of wrapping.
Undo / Redo	Patterns and arrangement only. `Ctrl+Z` / `Ctrl+Shift+Z`.
Export WAV	Bounces to 24-bit. The small `16` button gives 16-bit instead.
Share	Copies a link containing the whole project.

Why the delay follows the tempo

Changing BPM rescales the FX delay so it keeps the same note division. A delay left at a fixed number of milliseconds stops being in time the moment the tempo moves, which turns a throw into a smear.

What undo covers

Notes, drum cells, slice lanes, pattern automation, pattern and arrangement edits. Mixer moves are deliberately excluded: a fader is trivially put back, and filling the stack with hundreds of gain values would push the edit you actually wanted out of reach. Dragging counts as one step, not forty.

04The three modes

The mode buttons sit in the Arrangement panel and decide what the play button plays.

Mode	What plays	Use it for
pattern	The pattern you are editing, looped.	Writing.
song	The arrangement, start to finish.	Hearing the whole track.
live	Whatever you launch by hand.	Performing, and trying combinations.

05Step grid

Four drum rows: Kick, Snare, Ghost and Hat. Click a cell to toggle it. The × beside a row name clears that row.

Ghost is a quiet in-between snare. It is what makes a break breathe rather than march, and it is the single most useful row for making programmed drums sound less programmed.

Bars and resolution

Bars sets the pattern length: 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16. Growing a pattern keeps what you already wrote; shrinking it drops what falls off the end.

Grid switches the editor between 1/16 and 1/32. The important part: the data is always 1/32. The 1/16 view simply renders every second cell, so switching the view can never delete the 32nds in a hat roll. A cell hiding a 32nd between it and the next cell gets a small corner notch so you can see it is there.

06Piano rolls

Sub, Reese and Lead are note lanes, not on/off rows, because a bassline needs pitch and length. Each has its own sensible pitch window — a sub does not need six octaves — and scrolls vertically.

Action	Result
Click empty space	Draws a note at that pitch and step.
Drag a note	Moves it in time and pitch.
Drag its right edge	Changes its length.
Right-click a note	Deletes it.
−8ve / −1 / +1 / +8ve	Transposes the whole lane.
Clear	Empties the lane.

New note in the pattern header sets the pitch that freshly drawn notes start at. It does not move notes you have already written.

Which lane for what

Sub — a pure sine. It goes to the bass bus, is summed to mono below 90 Hz and is ducked by the drums. Never distorted: saturating a sine is how a sub turns into a mid-range buzz.
Reese — two detuned saws beating against each other, with moving detune and a driven 24 dB/oct filter. One trick, done properly.
Lead — the general-purpose synth. Fully editable in the Lead panel.

07Sampler & chopping

Eight slots, numbered along the top. Each holds one sample with its own chops, settings, output bus and tempo-lock. Select a slot, then Load into slot N.

Chopping

Action	Result
Click the waveform	Adds a cut.
Drag a cut	Moves it.
Right-click a cut	Deletes it.
Double-click a slice	Plays it.
1/16, 1/32	Cuts the sample into equal divisions.
Snap to hits	Finds transients automatically.
Clear chops	Back to one slice.

The fast way

Hit Snap to hits, then fix the two or three it got wrong by hand. Auto-detection and manual chopping write to the same cut points, so there is no mode to switch between.

Playing slices

Every slot gets its own slice lane in the pattern grid, labelled with its number and sample name. Click a cell to place the selected slice; right-click to clear it. Because each slot has a separate lane, slots layer — a chopped break and a vocal stab can hit the same step.

Per-slice settings

Control	What it does
Pitch	±24 semitones. Does not change the slice's length, so a pitched snare still lands on the grid.
Pitch env	Extra semitones at the start, decaying across the slice. Small negative values give the classic drum drop.
Gain / Pan	Level and stereo position for that slice alone.
Reverse	Plays the slice backwards.
Attack / Decay / Sustain / Release	Amplitude envelope. Defaults carry 2 ms attack and 6 ms release because a slice cut mid-waveform starts and ends on a discontinuity, which clicks.
Out	Which bus the slot plays into: drums, bass or synths. A vocal does not want the drum bus's sidechain.

08Tempo-locking loops

Fit to stretches the whole sample to 1, 2, 4 or 8 bars at your project tempo — without changing its pitch. This is what makes a borrowed loop or an acapella sit on your grid instead of drifting off it within a bar.

The readout tells you the stretch factor and how many bars the sample naturally is at the current tempo, so you can pick the right target. Every slice stretches by the same factor, so your chops stay in their relative places, and the whole thing follows if you change the tempo.

How it works

Pitch and time are separated by granular resynthesis: grain origins advance at the stretch rate while the read pointer inside each grain advances at the pitch rate. The two are independent, so you can stretch without repitching, repitch without stretching, or both.

Mashups

Load an acapella, set Fit to so its bars line up, route it Out → synths so it skips the drum sidechain, and chop it where the phrases start. Then drop those chops into its slice lane wherever you want them.

09Drum kit

The four drum rows use synthesised voices until you load your own. Any row with a sample plays it; any row without keeps the built-in voice, so a half-loaded kit is usable rather than half-silent. ▶ auditions, × goes back to the synth voice.

Control	What it does
Pitch	±24 semitones. Couples to length, the way a sampler should.
Gain / Pan	Level and position for that piece.
Choke	Cuts the tail after a set time. Fades over 8 ms rather than hard-stopping, because cutting mid-cycle clicks.

10Lead synth

Unison oscillators into a filter with its own envelope, then an amp envelope. Standard architecture on purpose — it behaves the way you expect a synth to.

Control	What it does
Saw / Square / Tri	Oscillator shape.
Unison	1–7 copies. They start at spread phases, so you get width from the first sample rather than waiting for them to drift apart.
Detune	How far apart those copies sit, in cents.
Sub	A sine an octave down, routed past the filter so a sweep cannot eat it.
Cutoff / Reso	Filter frequency and resonance.
Env	How far the filter envelope pushes the cutoff, in octaves.
F.decay	How fast the filter closes again. Short values give the click of a stab.
Attack / Decay / Sustain / Release	Amplitude envelope.
Level	Output gain.

Unison is not a volume knob

Adding voices divides the level by √N, so turning unison up changes the width and not the loudness. Without that, "more voices sounds better" would only mean "louder".

11Playing notes in

Pick an instrument under Play in, then play with a MIDI keyboard or the computer keys. Holding a key sustains the note.

Control	What it does
Sub / Reese / Lead	Which lane you are playing and recording into.
Octave	Where the lower key row starts. The upper row is one octave above it.
Quantise	Snaps recorded notes to 1/16, 1/8, 1/4, or off for raw 1/32 timing.
Record	When armed and the transport is running, what you play is written in.
Enable MIDI	Asks for device access. Only requested when you click it.

Note length is measured from key-down to key-up, so how long you hold a note is how long it lasts in the pattern.

Wheels and pressure

Control	What it does
Pitch bend	Bends sounding notes by up to ±2 semitones, the near-universal default. A small deadzone around centre stops a resting wheel from detuning everything.
Aftertouch	Opens the voice's filter — up to two octaves on the Lead, three on the Reese. Pressure making a held note grow is brightness, not volume.
Mod wheel	Does the same as aftertouch, since that is what players reach for on a controller without pressure.

Wheel positions are remembered, so a note struck while the wheel is already held starts bent rather than snapping into place. Bend and pressure affect what you play live; they are not recorded into the pattern.

Recording in song mode

If the arrangement is playing a different pattern than the one open in the grid, recording is refused rather than writing notes into a pattern you cannot see. Either switch to pattern mode, or open the pattern that is playing.

12Automation

Add a lane from the dropdown under the grid, then click to place points, drag to move them and right-click to delete. A lane is flat before its first point and after its last, so a single point is a constant value rather than a ramp from nowhere.

Fourteen targets are available:

Group	Targets
Filter	Drums, Bass and Synth filter cutoff.
Volume	Drums, Bass, Synth and Master volume.
Send	Drums, Bass and Synth send into the FX return.
FX	Reverb amount, Delay amount, Delay feedback, Synth drive.

Why the filter lane feels right

Cutoff is mapped exponentially. A linear sweep from 40 Hz to 20 kHz spends three quarters of its travel above 5 kHz where almost nothing audible happens; mapping it exponentially puts the useful range under the middle of the lane, where you draw.

Automation belongs to the pattern, so it repeats everywhere that pattern plays. Values are ramped between steps rather than stepped, because at 174 BPM a 1/32 is 43 ms and stepping a cutoff that often is audible as zipper noise.

Across the whole arrangement

A pattern lane restarts every loop, which is right for a per-bar wobble and useless for a sweep that rises across a sixteen-bar drop. Song automation, under the arrangement in song mode, draws lanes along the whole track measured in bars instead.

Same controls — click to place, drag to move, right-click to delete — with placement snapped to a quarter bar, which is what you can aim at on that scale. Where a song lane and a pattern lane drive the same target, the song lane wins: it is the higher-level intent, and the one you drew while listening to the whole track.

13Pattern library

Sixteen starting points: eleven genre skeletons (Drum & Bass, Liquid, Neurofunk, Dark DnB, Jump Up, Techstep, Crossbreed, Technoid, Breaks, Hardcore, Jungle) and five classic breaks (Amen, Think, Funky Drummer, Apache, Two-Step).

Loading one replaces the drum rows only. Your notes, slice lanes and automation are left alone, so you can audition skeletons underneath a bassline you already wrote. A one-bar preset repeats across however many bars your pattern has.

Each preset carries its own tempo and swing — a Jungle skeleton at 174 with no swing is not Jungle — but that is a toggle, in case you set your tempo deliberately.

14Arranging

The pattern bank at the bottom of the Arrangement panel holds your patterns. Click one to edit it; the + beside it appends it to the song.

Control	What it does
New	Adds an empty pattern.
Duplicate	Copies the current pattern — the usual way to make a variation.
Clear	Empties the current pattern, keeping its length and root note.
Delete	Removes it, along with any blocks in the song that used it.

The timeline

Each block names a pattern and how many times it repeats. Blocks are sized by how many bars they occupy, so the shape of the track is visible at a glance — you can see the intro is eight bars and the drop is thirty-two without counting.

Action	Result
Drag a block	Reorders it.
− / +	Changes its repeat count.
Double-click a block	Loops that section.
▶ on a block	Plays the song from there.
× on a block	Removes it from the song.

Storing repeats rather than copying bars is why editing a pattern updates every place it plays — and why a six-minute arrangement is still a few hundred bytes.

15Live clips

Switch to live mode and the pattern bank becomes a grid: patterns across the top, parts down the side.

Action	Result
Click a pattern in the top row	Launches every part from that pattern.
Click a cell	Switches just that part to that pattern.
Click a queued cell again	Cancels it.
Click a part name	Drops that part out entirely.
Launch every	How long a queued change waits: 1, 2, 4 or 8 bars.
Double-click a pattern	Opens it for editing without launching it.

Queued cells pulse until the boundary arrives. That is the point of quantised launching: you press early and trust it to land on the bar, so you need to see the press registered.

Because each part chooses its own pattern, you can run the drums from one pattern and the bass from another. Patterns are not split into per-track clips — a pattern still holds every part — each part simply picks which pattern to listen to, which means any pattern works as a clip for any part.

Drop-outs affect exports

Dropping a part out is a live control and is not saved with your project — but if you leave one muted and export, it stays muted in the file.

16Mixer

Three source buses — Drums, Bass, Synths — plus an FX return.

Control	What it does
M / S	Mute and solo. Solo silences the others but leaves the FX return audible, so soloing the drums still gives you the drums' reverb.
Meter	Peak and RMS, measured on the audio thread.
Fader	Bus level.
EQ — Low / Mid / at / High	Low shelf, sweepable mid bell, high shelf. Flat at 0 and always in circuit.
Send	How much of the bus goes to the FX return. Post-fader, so pulling a fader down takes its reverb with it.

Bass — Duck

A real sidechain compressor keyed from the drum bus, not a gain envelope faked on every kick. It follows the actual drum signal, so a ghost kick ducks less than a downbeat — which is what makes the pump breathe instead of stutter.

Amount	How much of the effect is applied.
Thresh	Level at which ducking starts.
Release	How fast the bass comes back.

Synths — Saturate

Three-band saturation. Driving a Reese full-range is what makes it fizz: the growl lives in the mids, but a wideband shaper cooks the low end to mush before the mids are dirty enough. Splitting first lets you cook the mids and leave the rest alone.

Low / Mid / High	Drive per band.
Mix	Blend against the dry signal. At 0 it is bit-transparent.

The drive knob is not a volume knob

Gain is compensated so a signal at −12 dBFS comes out at −12 dBFS at any drive setting. Turning it up changes character, not loudness — otherwise "more drive sounds better" would just be "louder sounds better".

FX return

Reverb — Amount / Size	Level and tail length.
Delay — Amount / Feedback / Damp	Level, regeneration, and how dark the repeats get.
1/16, 3/16, 1/8, 1/4, 1/2	Delay time as a note division. 3/16 is the DnB default.

One shared reverb rather than one per channel: cheaper, and it puts the whole track in one space instead of three different ones.

17Master chain

Everything sums into a three-band limiter, then a lookahead clipper, then the master fader.

Limiter GR	How hard the limiter is working.
Ceiling	The clipper's output limit, in dB.
Drive	How hard you push into it. Loudness with grit rather than clean headroom.

Sub content below 90 Hz is summed to mono automatically. Wide sub cancels on big systems and eats headroom, so DnB low end is kept dead centre.

18Exporting

Export WAV bounces to 24-bit, 44.1 kHz. The 16 button gives 16-bit. 24-bit is the default because the limiter lands a bounce near full scale, and 24-bit costs 50% more bytes for 48 dB more room underneath.

What gets rendered depends on the mode:

pattern	The pattern you are editing.
song	The whole arrangement.
live	Your current clip setup, over the longest pattern any part is running.

Two seconds of tail are added so reverbs and long notes finish. The render runs faster than real time and goes through the same voices, the same EQ, the same sidechain and the same limiter you monitored through — there is no second code path that could drift.

If an export comes out silent

Check the master fader, and check whether a bus is soloed or a part is dropped out. Solos, mutes and live drop-outs all carry into the file.

19Saving & sharing

Your project saves automatically in this browser and reloads when you come back. Settings live in local storage; samples live in IndexedDB, stored as their original encoded bytes rather than decoded audio, which is roughly ten times smaller.

Share copies a link containing the whole project — patterns, arrangement, automation, mixer, chop points — compressed to around a kilobyte, small enough to paste into a chat.

Samples do not travel

Audio files are megabytes and cannot go in a URL. A shared project arrives complete but with empty sample slots. That is usually what you want: someone hears your arrangement and drops their own breaks into it.

Reset project clears everything, including loaded samples. There is no undo for that beyond a share link you saved earlier.

20Beat Lab & DAW transfer

Beat Lab is the quick sketchpad: a one-bar Grid Sequencer and a 32-row Tracker. Each tracker row is a 16th note, so a tracker pattern is two bars long.

Working in Beat Lab

Control	How to use it
Pattern library	Expand it in Grid Sequencer to choose a genre or classic break. Loading a preset replaces the grid and changes its tempo and swing; Undo restores the previous beat.
Grid steps	Each click cycles off → on → accent → off. The square beside a track name mutes that track. Steps and mute buttons also work with keyboard focus.
Tracker	Choose an instrument, click a pattern cell and type notes. Use the pattern slots and Song order to build a longer arrangement. The sampler lets you load and chop a break.
Play / Stop	Use the button or Space when focus is on the page. The position display follows the current step or tracker row.
Undo / Redo	Use the buttons, `Ctrl+Z` and `Ctrl+Shift+Z` (Command on Mac). Covers grid edits and accents, track mutes, tracker notes, patterns and song order, tempo, swing, volume, reverb and delay. Clear and Randomise can be undone. Undo history lasts for this page visit; sample loading and chop edits are outside its scope.
Saving	Beat settings and patterns save in this browser and restore on reload. The status above the editor reports whether saving is available. Sample audio lasts for the current visit: reload the original audio file when returning to a sampled beat.
Share / Export WAV	Share copies a beat link with patterns and settings, without sample audio. Export WAV renders the sound, including loaded samples and effects.

Continue in the DAW

→ Send to DAW saves your Beat Lab session and opens the imported project in the same tab. The imported project becomes the DAW's current project. Save a share link for an existing DAW project before replacing it, and keep your original sample files.

Grid Sequencer: sends the one-bar grid. Muted tracks are omitted. Sub and Reese rhythms become notes at fixed starting pitches, ready to edit in the piano rolls.
Tracker: sends all eight two-bar pattern slots, the selected pattern and the song order. Sub and Reese retain their note pitches; Stab becomes the DAW's Lead. Song playback mode carries across when a song order is present and enabled.
Timing: both editors use 16ths; the DAW stores 1/32, so a Beat Lab step occupies two stored DAW ticks. Tempo and swing carry across.
Sound mapping: clap becomes snare; open hat and ride become hat. Drum accents become on/off steps. Reverb and delay are mapped to the DAW's effects. The result uses DAW instruments, so it will sound different.

Transferring a sampled tracker beat

If any tracker pattern contains sample slices, Send to DAW displays a message and keeps you in Beat Lab. Use Export WAV to include the samples, then load that WAV into a slot under Sample & sound in the DAW. WAV also preserves the sound of a synth beat when that matters more than editable notes.

21Keyboard reference

Key	Action
Space	Play / stop
Ctrl+Z	Undo
Ctrl+Shift+Z, Ctrl+Y	Redo
z s x d c v g b h n j m , l . ; /	Lower octave, white and black keys as on a piano
q 2 w 3 e r 5 t 6 y 7 u i 9 o 0 p	Upper octave
Pitch / mod wheel	Bend and brighten sounding notes
Right-click	Delete — a note, a chop, a slice-lane step, an automation point
Double-click	Audition a slice · loop an arrangement block · open a pattern in live mode

Typing in a text field never triggers notes or shortcuts.

22Troubleshooting

Symptom	Cause
No sound at all	Browsers block audio until you interact. Click Play.
A panel is missing	Choose Compose, Sample & sound or Mix for its tools, or All panels to show everything. Workspace changes do not delete content.
Beat Lab will not send to DAW	A tracker pattern contains sample slices. Export WAV and load it into a DAW sample slot; the inline message explains this route.
A Beat Lab sample is missing after reload	Beat patterns are saved, but Beat Lab sample audio is session-only. Load the original sample again and recreate its chops, or use a WAV exported before leaving.
One part is silent	Check solo on another bus, mute on that bus, or a live drop-out.
The export is silent	Same three, plus the master fader.
A loop drifts out of time	Set Fit to for that slot so it stretches to your tempo.
Recorded notes are invisible	They landed outside the lane's pitch window. Check the Octave setting.
The playhead freezes but audio continues	The tab is in the background. Audio is scheduled in a worker and keeps running; the display resumes when you come back.
Everything vanished	Clearing site data clears the project. Share links are the only backup.
Crackling on a busy pattern	Too many voices for the machine. Shorten slice releases, or lower unison on the lead.

23Known limits

Stated plainly, because overstating a tool wastes more of your time than admitting the gaps.

Clips are per part, not per track — a pattern holds every instrument, and each part picks which pattern to follow.
No plugin support. Everything is built in.
Samples stay in your browser, so they do not travel in a share link.
Undo covers musical edits, not mixer moves.

24Under the hood

For the curious — none of this is needed to use the thing.

Clock. AudioContext.currentTime is the only source of truth. A worker wakes the scheduler every 25 ms and it schedules a 100 ms window ahead, so nothing is ever started "now" from a timer. Putting the pump in a worker is why a backgrounded tab keeps perfect time.
Custom DSP runs on the audio thread. The clipper, meters, sidechain, saturator and the slicer's voice engine are AudioWorklets. Nothing in the hot path allocates memory, so the audio thread never pauses for garbage collection.
Slicing. Granular overlap-add with Hann windows at 50% overlap. Grain origins advance at the stretch rate, the read pointer inside each grain at the pitch rate — which is what separates time from pitch.
Triggers are sample-accurate. Slices carry an absolute start frame, so a voice can begin mid-block. Block-aligned starts would smear transients by up to 2.6 ms, which is audible on drums.
Exports are not a second implementation. The offline renderer rebuilds the same graph and calls the same voices, so a bounce cannot drift from what you monitored.
Everything is local. No accounts, no uploads, no analytics on your audio. The page is served once and cached; after that the server does nothing.