Float Sequencer user guide

Open a project and choose your view

The first visit opens the original First light demo without starting playback. Your projects contains New project, Duplicate, Import JSON and three demo ideas. Choose New project for a blank eight-track workspace. Click the project name to rename it, then leave the field or press Enter to keep the change.

The header contains theme and language menus. Light and Dark use the same layout; Follow system follows your device appearance. Ten interface languages are available. These preferences belong to the browser, while notes and sounds belong to the project. Existing project names stay as you wrote them.

Play, pause, stop and set the groove

Play starts the selected pattern or arrangement. Pause keeps the next unheard step so you can resume; Stop returns to the beginning. First playback needs a user gesture to unlock browser audio. Leaving the page, a system audio interruption or a large scheduling delay pauses playback.

Tempo accepts 60–200 BPM and Swing accepts 0–60%. During playback these changes take effect at the next bar. Master adjusts the overall level. Lower it if the mix feels crowded, then balance the individual tracks. Space plays or pauses; Shift + Space stops when you are not typing in a field or using a dialog.

Set up one to eight independent tracks

Track settings sits below the playback controls. Select a track to edit its instrument, sound preset and six sound parameters. Add track lets you choose an instrument until there are eight tracks; Remove track works until one remains. The same instrument can appear on several tracks.

Available instruments are Kick, Snare, Clap, Closed hat, Open hat, Percussion, Bass and Melody. Bass is monophonic; Melody supports four voices. Each track has its own Volume, Pan, Tone, Decay, Delay and Reverb. The settings apply to that track across every pattern. Mute disables a track; Solo lets you hear selected tracks separately.

Changing an instrument keeps its rhythm and mix settings but resets its sound preset. Switching a chord to drums or bass keeps the strongest note at each step. Drum notes become one step long. Instrument changes and track removal can be undone.

Write and edit drum steps

In the desktop grid, click a drum cell to toggle a hit. Hold the pointer and drag across cells to draw or erase a run; release to finish. Shift-click selects an existing hit so you can adjust Velocity in the note controls. A draw gesture is one undo action.

On a phone, select the track above the 4 × 4 pads and tap the numbered pads. For a 32-step pattern choose the first or second bar. Track selection is shared with Track settings. If you interrupt a drag, release or cancel the pointer before starting a new gesture.

Enter bass and melody in the piano roll

Select Bass or Melody to show the pitch grid. Click an empty cell to create a note, drag a note to move it, or pull its right edge to adjust length. Double-click a note to delete it. The Note menu also selects existing notes; Velocity and Length then edit that note.

With a note focused, use arrow keys to move it, Shift + left/right to change its length and Delete to erase it. Bass keeps one note per start step. A melody step allows up to four different pitches, and overlapping playback is limited to four voices per melody track.

Scroll vertically through C0–C8. Zoom changes the pitch-row height from 25% to 200% and keeps the viewing centre; the octave arrows move the viewport. Zoom is a temporary view setting and resets on refresh. Key and Scale guide new note entry; pitches already in the project remain unchanged.

Edit the eight pattern slots

Pattern mode displays A–H plus Steps, Copy to… and Clear pattern. Sixteen steps make one bar; 32 make two, at sixteenth-note resolution in fixed 4/4. Reducing 32 steps to 16 removes notes in the second bar and trims notes crossing the new boundary. Undo restores the previous pattern.

Copy to… copies the current pattern into another slot. Clear pattern removes the current pattern’s notes. During pattern playback, choosing a different pattern queues it until the current pattern ends. Editing and playback selection remain visible in the pattern controls.

Build a repeatable arrangement

Switch to Arrangement to show the sequence above the grid. Add pattern inserts a reference to A–H; the same pattern can appear more than once, up to 16 slots. Click a slot to edit its underlying pattern below. Editing that pattern changes every arrangement slot that references it.

Drag slots to reorder them or remove one with its corner button. Pause arrangement playback before adding, removing or moving slots. The position returns to the beginning after a sequence edit. Removing a slot does not erase its pattern.

For keyboard control, focus a slot and use left/right or Home/End to move focus, Alt + left/right to reorder, and Delete or Backspace to remove. Pattern and arrangement edits can be undone with ⌘ / Ctrl + Z; Shift + ⌘ / Ctrl + Z redoes.

Keep editable backups

The app saves projects in this browser and shows the save status in the header. Your projects can create a duplicate, switch to another project or delete one after confirmation. Switching projects resets the editing history.

Export → Save project JSON downloads an editable backup. Import JSON in Your projects loads a validated v1 or v2 file of up to 1 MiB as a new project. Keep backups outside browser storage before clearing site data, changing browser profiles or moving to another device. If storage fails, the app still lets you edit and download JSON.

Export a pattern or the full arrangement as WAV

Open Export, choose Current pattern or Full arrangement, and press Export WAV. The app renders a snapshot of the project at that moment, so later edits do not change the file being prepared. When rendering finishes, press Download WAV.

The file is 44.1 kHz, 16-bit stereo PCM. It plays the chosen range once with two extra seconds for effects and a final fade. This is not guaranteed to be a seamless loop. On a low-memory device use a shorter arrangement or export individual patterns if rendering fails.

Float Sequencer currently focuses on synthesized patterns: MIDI, sample import, microphone recording, automation, plugins, variable time signatures and cloud sync are outside its current feature set. A WAV can be used as audio in another editor; JSON is the way back to editable Float Sequencer notes.

Keyboard reference

Menus support arrow keys, Home/End, typing to find an option, Enter to choose and Escape to cancel. Tab closes a menu and continues keyboard navigation. Shortcuts do not take over while you are typing in an input or using an open dialog.