Broke DJ
Start with one beat. Load your own music. Mix, record and export. The advanced tools stay here for when you want them.
No password. We email you a link that signs you in. Your projects keep saving in this browser either way. An account just adds a copy you can open somewhere else.
Keyboard
Shortcuts stand down while you are typing in a box, so a project name containing the letter P does not open the piano roll.
Lyrics
What it did
Vocal Recorder
Takes live for this session only, because audio files are too big to keep in the browser between visits. Press KEEP to download one before you close the tab.
Prompt Beat Generator Rule based. No AI model.
GENERATE reads your text for a tempo and a genre word and rolls a pattern, on this device, with no model involved. BUILD THE DROP is the one that turns that loop into an arrangement: it writes patterns A to D as an arc and sets the song chain to play them.
What it did, and why a room reacts to it
Sound Design
Every number each voice is built from. Changes are heard on the next hit and are written into the export, because live playback and the exported file are built by the same function from these same values.
The two returns
One reverb and one delay, shared by every voice. The send amount on each tab decides how much of that voice goes in. Sends are taken after the fader, so pulling a track down takes its tail with it.
Visual Deck
A lighting desk is a patch bay, not a drawing. Three numbers come out of the audio, four things on screen can change, and the craft is deciding which drives which. Change a route below and watch the preview: that is the whole skill, and every look reads the same four routes so learning one teaches all of them.
How the board works, and how to build your own look
- Three bands, not thirty two. Bass is 20 to 200 Hz, the kick and the sub. Mid is 200 Hz to 2 kHz, where most of the music lives. High is 2 kHz up, hats and air. A room cannot read thirty two of anything and neither can you while you are mixing.
- Loudness is curved, not linear. The analyser reports decibels, about -100 to 0. Minus forty is quiet to a listener and sixty per cent of the way up a linear scale, so mapping it straight gives you a light that is on almost all the time. Each band is normalised against a floor and then raised to a power, which is the difference between a light that flickers and one that hits.
- Peaks fall slowly. A kick is loud for about thirty milliseconds, which is two frames. A light on for two frames reads as a glitch. Every band holds a falling peak: instant attack, release an eye can follow.
- Route, then look. Try Bass to Size and nothing else, then add High to Brightness. Two routes usually read better than four, for the same reason a mix with two loud things in it reads better than one with six.
- Strobe is capped on purpose. Photosensitivity guidance draws a line near three flashes a second; this will not exceed two whatever the music does, and that is not a setting because a setting is something somebody turns up.
- Adding a look is one object. In assets/dj-visuals.js, a look is a label, a blurb and a draw function that receives the routed values already resolved. It never reads the analyser itself, which is what keeps every look consistent with the patch.
Mastering Chain
This sits after the volume knob and before the limiter. EQ shapes the tone. Comp glues it together. Loud pushes more gain into the limiter for a bigger, tighter master. Watch the LIMIT light above. If it stays on, back Loud off a little.
DNA Creative Engine
Every dial is a musical trait wired to a real control. Tempo. Master filter. Reverb and its size. Delay. Swing. Drum drive. Synth tone. Step chaos. Loose timing and loose velocity. Pitch drift. Bit crushing with a vinyl noise bed.
GENERATE writes a fresh pattern into the current slot, straight from the genome. It is deterministic, so the same genome always makes the same beat. MUTATE nudges the dials at random. EVOLVE pushes them to the extremes. Both rewrite the pattern so you hear the change right away. LOCK GENOME saves the current dials under a name. Every result is logged below, next to its parent. SONG writes a whole arrangement. Eight linked sections from one genome, and it switches song mode on. All of this is rule-based. None of it is a trained model.
The Copper Rack
Original presets for the lead and bass voices already in this studio. Every one of these is synthesis: an oscillator, an envelope, a filter. Nothing here is a sample, and nothing here was copied from anyone else's work. That line is on the record for every preset below.
Style Cards
A complete starting point in one tap: tempo, swing, a drum pattern, a bassline, chords, and two Copper Rack presets chosen to suit it. Unlike RANDOM, these do not roll dice. The same card gives you the same bar every time, which is what lets each one explain itself. Loading a card replaces the pattern you are on.
None of these is a definition of the genre. Every one of these traditions is older and larger than a sixteen-step grid, and several were built by particular communities who were not asked about a preset bank. Treat a card as one idiomatic bar to start from and then leave.
DJ Decks
Play the music you already pay for
Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube lock their audio. No website can take it and mix it, and we will not pretend otherwise. Here is the honest way in, and it takes about ten seconds.
- Play the track in their app. You are already paying for it. Keep it playing.
- Get that sound into this device. A cable is cleanest. A speaker near the mic works too.
- Turn LIVE IN on using the button in the deck above, then raise its level.
- Mix it. It joins the master, so pads, the engine and a second deck all play over it.
Using a mic near a speaker? Turn the level up slowly. Mic and speaker in the same room can feed back and squeal. A cable never does.
Want full control, with EQ, sync and crossfades? That needs a real file. Use ADD TRACKS below for music saved on this device, or open The Decks, which also plays Audius.
YOUR CRATE
WORLD PADS, PICK A SOUND, SAMPLE ANYTHING AROUND YOU, OR DROP A FILE ON A PAD
VOICE LAB
Put a sound on a pad (a shout from the VOICE PACK, a file, or your own voice), then shape it here. Everything happens on this device.
The decks. Two decks, all on your device. LOAD plays any audio file you have. BOUNCE drops your current pattern onto a deck with its BPM attached. In SONG MODE it bounces the whole chain. PITCH works like vinyl, so speed and pitch move together, up to 8 percent. TAP sets the BPM on files you load. SYNC matches this deck to the other one. The crossfader is equal power. FADE glides it over eight seconds. Both decks run through the mastering chain. Decks are for playing live, so they are not in engine WAV exports. No fake stem splitting here. The engine already owns its own stems.
The crate. This is your record box, kept on this machine. ADD reads every file you give it and works out the BPM, the musical key with its Camelot code, and an energy score. All of that is an estimate. All of it happens here. Nothing is uploaded. Pulling lyrics out of audio would need a trained speech model, so we do not pretend. Give a track TAG words instead. Moods, themes, lyric ideas. Smart suggestions match your crate to tempo, energy, mood and tags. SUGGEST ranks the crate against what is playing. It uses harmonic mixing rules, tempo distance, your party arc, and tags. AUTO PARTY mixes the next pick in on its own as a track ends. The crate lives in this browser. Clearing site data clears it.
Playing from anywhere else. LIVE IN opens this device's audio input. That is the honest bridge. Play anything through a line in or the mic and it joins the mix. Streaming services lock their audio behind DRM. No app can lift it directly, and BROKEHELLA will not pretend otherwise. LOAD URL pulls direct audio links when the host allows it. LOOP grabs 1, 2 or 4 beats on the fly using each track's BPM.
Pads and recording. WORLD PADS ship with a starter kit. Kicks, snare, clap, hats, crash, tom, cowbell, shaker, laser, riser, sub drop, chord stab and an air horn. The engine builds every one of those on your machine the first time you use it. No downloads. No copyrighted recordings. Real songs belong in the crate, LIVE IN, or LOAD URL. The dot on each pad samples the room through your mic. FILE, or dropping an audio file on a pad, loads your own sound, up to 30 seconds: a voice drop, a tag, a shout-out. It is read on this machine and never uploaded. The SOUND LIBRARY under the pads has over two hundred more, from drums, 808s and Caribbean percussion to synths, arcade sounds, rain, whales and sirens, built the same way; the animals are synthesized impressions, not recordings. The VOICE PACK has designed voices shouting in 32 languages, plus slang and sayings, and CAST & CHOIR stacks children, adults and a deep bass into chords. They were generated ahead of time with a voice model on our own machine, none of them is a real person, and the Trust Center says how they were made. SAY ANYTHING speaks any line you type, in the voices and languages your own phone or computer has. Only on-device voices are offered, so the words stay here. It plays straight to your speakers, so it cannot go on a pad or into REC SET; the voice pack can. The VOICE LAB under the pads reshapes any pad (pitch, cadence, tone, stacks, harmony), PLAY AS KEYS turns it into an instrument across the keyboard, and SAVE WAV keeps it as a file. Record your own voice there and play yourself as keys. Pads last for this session only. Keys 1 to 8 fire them. REC SET records the master bus into a file you can download. That means everything you hear. Engine, decks, pads and live input.
Coach
The machine notices. The DJ decides.Read the set
Everything below is worked out on this device from your own decks and your own master output. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored.
Mix autopsy
Press READ MY SET, play a mix, then press it again.
Set arc
The room Simulation
A rule running against your own loudness, not a prediction about people. Movement chases loudness and change, attention drains when nothing changes, and fatigue only climbs while the set is loud. It is a thinking tool. No real room has ever been measured by it.
Loophole live
The twenty rooms off the Loophole plan, floor by floor, each in its own colour. Low end shakes the rooms and the Boiler Room takes the most of it. Mids light them, the top end picks out people at the windows, and the Bedroom and the Snug barely move, because that is what those rooms are for.
Master controls. Drag a knob up or down. Or scroll on it. Or tab to it and use the arrow keys.
Arrangement
This is your song, left to right. Each block is one pattern. Tap a block to go and edit that part. Drag a block sideways to move that section earlier or later.
Drum grid. Each button is one step. Press it to turn that hit on or off. Use the bar buttons above to move between bars.
Tap empty space to place a note. Tap a note to pick it, then move LENGTH and VELOCITY to change it. Tap it again to remove it.
Mix Match
The first thing every DJ learns: two records, one tempo. Deck A plays in your left ear, deck B in your right, a few percent off. Ride B's pitch until the kicks stop galloping, hold SLOW or PUSH until they land together, then LOCK IT. Five rounds, scored on tempo and timing. Headphones help.
Live Pads
Hit PLAY to start, or just press SPACE. Every track has VOL and PAN, so you get a real stereo mix. TAP a tempo, or use the preset buttons. STEMS saves each track as its own WAV file. SHARE URL packs your pattern into a link. SMART FILL builds an arrangement around what you already made. TO MELODY turns a hummed voice take into piano roll notes. Ctrl/Cmd+Z undoes. Shift+Z redoes. Press ? for every shortcut. Nothing leaves this browser. Take care of each other.