5. Effects

Any track can carry a chain of effects — several at once, reordered, switched off without being removed. Put one on by dragging it from the browser's EFFECTS tab onto a track (or its instrument screen), or by dropping a factory preset straight from the browser, which adds the effect already dialled in. On the instrument screen, switch to FX to see and tweak a track's chain: each effect is a card with an On/Off button, ◀ ▶ to move it earlier/later in the chain, and × to remove it (removing is undoable, like everything else).

Effects process in order, left to right — an EQ before a delay sounds different from a delay before that same EQ, because each stage hears what the one before it already did.

Delay — echoes

Repeats the sound after a while, over and over, a little quieter each time.

Knob	What it does
Time	How long until the echo is heard
Feedback	How many times the echo repeats
Mix	Balance between the dry sound and the echoes
Ping-pong	Echoes bounce between the left and right speakers
Tone	Darkens each repeat (lower = duller, more tape-like)

Presets: Slapback, Eighth Echo, Dotted Ping, Tape Long.

Reverb — the sound of a room

Knob	What it does
Room size	Bigger rooms have longer tails
Damping	How quickly high pitches die away in the tail
Width	How wide the reverb sounds (0 = mono, full = stereo)
Mix	Balance between the dry sound and the reverb
Pre-delay	A short gap before the reverb starts, keeping the original sound clear

Presets: Small Room, Bright Plate, Big Hall, Cathedral.

EQ — boost or cut parts of the sound

A 4-band equalizer: a low shelf, two adjustable "bell" bands and a high shelf, each with its own frequency, gain (in dB) and Q (how narrow the bump/cut is), plus an overall output level.

Presets: Warm, Bright, Telephone, Low Cut.

Compressor — evens the sound out

Turns loud moments down automatically, so a track sits more evenly in the mix.

Knob	What it does
Threshold	The level above which the compressor starts working
Ratio	How hard it pushes back once above the threshold
Attack	How quickly it reacts
Release	How quickly it lets go afterward
Makeup	Turns the whole signal back up afterward
Mix	Blend with the untouched signal (parallel compression)

Presets: Gentle Glue, Punch, Squash.

Chorus — thickens a sound into "more than one voice"

A short delay whose time wobbles up and down, smoothly. Mixed with the original, the tiny, ever-shifting pitch difference sounds like two or three voices playing together instead of one. The left and right channels wobble a quarter-cycle apart, which is what spreads it across the stereo field.

Knob	What it does
Rate	How fast the wobble cycles
Depth	How far it wobbles
Delay	The centre the wobble happens around
Feedback	Feeds a little of the wobbled sound back in, for a more resonant colour
Mix	Balance between dry and wobbled

Presets: Subtle, Wide Ensemble, Retro Chorus, Vibrato.

Flanger — the "jet plane" sweep

A very short, heavily fed-back version of the same wobbling-delay idea as Chorus. The short delay combined with the original creates moving comb-filter notches in the sound, which sweep as the delay time wobbles — the classic jet-plane whoosh.

Knobs: Rate, Depth, Delay (0.5–8 ms), Feedback, Mix. Presets: Jet Sweep, Subtle Flange, Metallic.

Phaser — a softer, swimmy sweep

Six filter stages per channel that each bend the phase of every frequency without changing its loudness; sweeping them together with a slow wave marches moving notches through the sound — softer and less metallic than a flanger.

Knobs: Rate, Depth, Freq (the middle the notches swing around), Feedback (resonance), Mix. Presets: Warm Phaser, Slow Swirl, Deep Phase.

What is not there yet

Utility tools (gain/pan/width), a limiter, a gate, distortion/saturation, an auto-filter, a multiband compressor and convolution reverb are on the roadmap but not built yet.