Free · in your phone's browser · nothing uploaded
Hum to pluck
Hum a melody and hear it plucked: every note struck once, then fading, the way a pluck synth plays a house or future bass hook.
Mika plucks each note once and lets it fade. Hold a note longer and it only rings.Four ticks count you in at 123 BPM, then the microphone listens for two bars, about four seconds, and closes. Nothing is recorded or sent anywhere.
What a pluck does to a hum
A pluck has a fast attack and a decay and no sustain: once struck, the note only gets quieter, like a guitar string. Holding the key longer doesn't keep it loud, it just lets the tail ring. So a long hummed note becomes one strike and a fade, and what carries a pluck line is how many notes it has and where they start, not how long they last.
That's why the page lets each note ring until the next one starts, as a mono pluck would, and why quick hums sound best here: try Straight for steady 8ths or Syncopated for the push. The line sits between C5 and B5, where a pluck's click and sparkle come through.
Three plucks
All three are samples from the app, the same files it plays. Stratos is soft and woody, from progressive house. Bleep is short and bright, a blip with a tail. Saw pluck is a sawtooth with its filter snapping shut, the slap house sound. Tap a chip and the same two bars play again.
Where the pluck comes from
Plucks were among the first sounds computers made convincingly. In 1983 Kevin Karplus and Alex Strong published a plucked string made from almost no computation: a short burst of noise sent round a delay line and filtered a little on every pass, so the tone dies away like a real string. Today's pluck presets get there with envelopes: a filter and a volume that fall to nothing after the strike.
What's in the pack
Five MIDI files, one per timing, on channel 1, in your key and tempo, five WAVs of the lines on the pluck you chose, exactly two bars long, and a README.
A pluck's tail rings past the bar line, so the WAVs are rendered twice round and the second pass kept: the tail is already in the loop's first beat and it loops clean.
Into your DAW
Put the MIDI on any pluck preset, or build one: a saw, a filter envelope with zero sustain and a short decay, the amp envelope the same. A delay at a dotted 8th fills the gaps between the notes by itself.
Sources: Karplus and Strong's 1983 plucked string from Wikipedia, Karplus–Strong string synthesis and Kevin Karplus's own page on the paper.
Or hear it in a track
Hear it in a track opens Brumm with the line on the grid on the pluck you chose, under a beat. For the same hum held instead of plucked, try Hum to synth lead.
Your voice stays on your phone: the tool reads it in the browser and keeps nothing. How the site counts visits.
Audio: your microphone, on only after you tap. The sound is analysed in this tab and never sent. Nothing about the audio reaches the visit count.