How BanaDAW works · every feature explained

Quick start

Pick a starter. Choose one from Start from a bunch under the studio, or press Start from scratch to empty every channel and keep the sounds.
Press Space. The loop plays round and round. Everything you change is heard on the next pass.
Click a channel in the bunch (the list on the left). Drums open the drum roll, everything else opens the piano roll.
Click the grid to add notes. Drag them to move, drag their right edge to make them longer, click them again to remove them.
Turn the knobs under the editor to change the sound. Double-click a knob to reset it.

The toolbar

Play, stop and the metronome: Play starts the loop from the top. The metronome (the little pyramid, or M) clicks on every beat, louder on the first beat of each bar. It is never in your WAV.
Position: Shows bar, beat and sixteenth while you play. The banana next to it bobs on every beat.
BPM: The tempo, from 60 to 200 beats a minute.
Loop: 1, 2, 4 or 8 bars. Making the loop longer repeats what you have; making it shorter cuts the end off (undo brings it back).
Key and scale: Changing the key moves every melody with it. The scale decides which rows of the piano roll are highlighted and which notes Scale lock allows.
Swing: Pushes every other sixteenth a little late, for a lazier groove. Good on lo-fi and house; leave it at zero for techno.
Filter: The master filter. Turn it left to make everything darker and muffled, right to make it thin. Sweeping it is the classic way to build up to a drop.
Drive and Master: Drive adds warm saturation to the whole mix. Master is the overall volume. The meter next to them turns red if you're too loud.
Start from scratch, Loops: Start from scratch empties every channel but keeps your sounds. Loops loads a starter. Undo brings back what you had either way.
Post, Share link, WAV: See Saving and sharing.

The bunch (your channels)

Every instrument in the loop is a channel. Each row has:

A banana to mute the channel. A muted channel is “peeled”: the banana goes grey.
S to solo it, so you only hear that channel (and anything else soloed).
A small knob for its volume.
A preview of what it plays. Click the name or the preview to edit it.

+ Add channel at the bottom adds any drum or synth. Compact makes the rows smaller when you have a lot of them. The channel panel under the editor lets you rename, change the instrument, duplicate or delete the selected channel.

Notes: the piano roll and drum roll

Drawing

Click an empty spot to add a note. It's as long as Length says, and it starts on the grid set by Snap.
Drag a note to move it. Drag its right edge to make it longer or shorter (clicking a note also sets Length to match it).
Click a note without dragging to delete it. Right-click and drag to erase several.
Draw can place a whole chord with one click: three or four notes built from your scale, a power chord or an octave.
Scale lock keeps new and moved notes in the key. Turn it off for chromatic notes. Ghosts shows the other instruments' notes faintly, so you can line things up.
The keys on the left play when clicked. The letters A to K on your keyboard play too.

Selecting and copying

Alt/Option + drag draws a box. Every note it touches turns pink and is selected. Add Shift to add to what's already selected.
Drag any selected note and the whole selection moves with it. Dragging the end of one resizes them all.
Shift + drag a note to pull out a copy and leave the original where it was. If the note is part of a selection, the whole selection is copied. This works on single notes too.
With notes selected: arrow keys move them, Delete removes them, Ctrl/Cmd + D duplicates them right after themselves, Esc lets go.

The drum roll

Pick any drum channel and the editor shows every drum at once, one row each. Click squares to add or remove hits, drag to paint a run of them, right-click to erase.

Ripeness (velocity)

The strip under the grid sets how hard each note or hit plays. Drag up and down on it. Soft hits show green, the hardest ones brown, like a banana ripening. Mix soft and hard hi-hats and the groove comes alive.

Sounds and knobs

Every sound is made live in your browser from oscillators and noise, no samples. Double-click any knob to reset it. Drag with Shift held for fine moves.

Synths

Rolling bass: the driving, distorted off-beat bass of dark techno.
Reese bass: two detuned saws that growl. Slides between overlapping notes.
Acid 303: the squelchy line. Overlap two notes to slide; turn up Reso and Env.
808: the long trap bass with glide.
Deep bass: round and warm, for house and lo-fi.
Grit lead, Supersaw, Arp, Pluck: leads from dirty to huge to bouncy.
Dark stab, Pad: chords, short and long.
Electric piano, Bell: keys.
Noise riser: sweeps up for as long as the note lasts. Draw one long note before a drop.
Squeaky banana: exactly what it sounds like.

Synth knobs

Cutoff: how bright the sound is. Low is muffled, high is open.
Reso: a whistling peak at the cutoff. High settings sound squelchy.
Env: how far the filter opens at the start of each note, for pluck and bite.
Attack: how slowly each note fades in.
Release: how long it rings after the note ends.
Drive: distortion, from warm to filthy.
Glide: (mono sounds) how long a slide takes between overlapping notes.

Drum knobs

Tune raises or lowers the pitch, Decay makes it shorter or longer, Tone makes it brighter (on a kick: more click), and Drive distorts it. Twelve drums, from kick and clap to cowbell and an impact boom.

The mix knobs

Volume and Pan (left and right), sends to the Reverb and to a ping-pong Delay timed to a dotted eighth, and Sidechain: the channel ducks every time the kick hits, then swells back. Put sidechain on basses, pads and chords for the pumping club sound.

Automation

Automation turns a knob for you as the loop plays: a filter that opens over four bars, a pan that swings, a reverb that swells at the end.

Open the Automation tab. Every channel gets a lane, with the master at the top.
In a lane, pick the knob you want to automate from its menu. The dashed line shows where that knob is now.
Click the line to add a point, then drag it. Click anywhere else in the lane to add a point there. Points snap to the grid; hold Alt/Option to place them freely.
Right-click or double-click a point to remove it. Clear removes the whole line.
Pick another knob in the same lane and draw that too. You can automate as many knobs on as many channels as you like. Knobs with automation show a ● in the menu, a pink dot on the knob itself, and they turn on their own while you play.

Condense all (or the ▾ on each lane) shrinks lanes to a thin strip, so a big loop fits on screen.

Pads: perform your loops

The pads turn BanaDAW into an instrument. Build 3 to 5 loops that work together (say an intro, a groove, a build and a drop), save each one to a pad, then play them live with your keyboard.

Make a loop in the Notes tab, open Pads and click an empty pad to save it there. Go back, change the loop, save it to the next pad, and so on. Saving records the loop as audio (it takes a second or two), so a pad plays instantly and barely uses your computer. Pads and their recordings are kept on this device.
Press 1 to 9 to launch a pad. Launching while another plays switches on the next beat (or the next bar, or straight away: see Launch on), and the new loop picks up at the same point in the bar, so the groove never stumbles. A waiting pad blinks.
Press the playing pad again and it starts over from the top straight away, like a sampler. Tap it two or three times for a quick stab.
Tap Q to I to jump straight to one of the 8 slices of the playing loop; it carries on from there. Hold one to keep looping that slice, like an MPC or a DJ's cue juggling.
Hold Z, X or C to stutter: repeat a beat, an eighth or a sixteenth, the classic build-up roll. Let go and it drops back in exactly in time.
0 stops at the end of the bar.
The pads have their own Filter: turn it left to make everything dark and muffled, right to make it thin, and add Resonance for a whistling sweep. Hold ← or → to sweep it smoothly from the keyboard while you play. Volume sets how loud the pads are.
Same tempo plays every pad at the toolbar's BPM. Because pads are recordings, a pad sped up or slowed down also goes up or down in pitch, like a record or a sampler. Turn it off to play each loop at its own tempo. Changed a loop? Save it to its pad again to re-record it.
Record captures everything you play and downloads it when you stop.

Each pad has buttons to replace it with the editor's loop, open it in the editor to change it, or empty it.

Saving and sharing

Your loop saves itself on this device after every change. Undo and redo go back about 150 steps.
Share link copies a link with the whole loop inside it. Whoever opens it gets their own copy to remix.
WAV downloads the loop played a few times round, ready for a phone, a video or another DAW.
Post to the board puts your loop on the board under the studio, where everyone can play it, remix it and give it a banana. The best ones rise to the top of the week. You get a short link to your post. Names are public, so keep them friendly, and use Report if you see something that shouldn't be there.

Keyboard shortcuts

Where	Keys	What it does
Everywhere	`Space`	Play or stop
Everywhere	`M`	Metronome on or off
Everywhere	`Ctrl/Cmd` + `Z`	Undo (add Shift to redo)
Notes	`A` + `W` + `S` + `E` + `D` + `F` + `T` + `G` + `Y` + `H` + `U` + `J` + `K`	Play the selected sound like a piano
Notes	`Alt/Option` + `drag`	Draw a box to select notes (add Shift to add to the selection)
Notes	`Shift` + `drag`	Pull out a copy of a note, or of every selected note
Notes	`Ctrl/Cmd` + `A`	Select every note in this channel
Notes	`Ctrl/Cmd` + `D`	Duplicate the selection right after itself
Notes	`↑` + `↓`	Move the selection up or down the scale (Shift: a whole octave)
Notes	`←` + `→`	Move the selection earlier or later
Notes	`Delete`	Delete the selection
Notes	`Esc`	Let go of the selection
Pads	`1` + `…` + `9`	Launch a pad (press the playing one again to restart it)
Pads	`0`	Stop at the end of the bar
Pads	`Q` + `W` + `E` + `R` + `T` + `Y` + `U` + `I`	Tap to jump to one of the 8 slices, hold to loop it
Pads	`Z` + `X` + `C`	Hold to stutter: repeat the last beat, 1/8 or 1/16
Pads	`←` + `→`	Hold to sweep the pads’ filter dark or thin

Getting the dark club sound

Open the Red Circle starter to hear it, or build it yourself:

BPM 126 to 130, a minor key. Kick on every beat with Drive up and Decay a bit long.
Clap on beats 2 and 4, an open hat on every off-beat, closed hats on the sixteenths in between at low ripeness.
A Rolling bass on the three sixteenths after each kick, never on the kick itself. Turn its Sidechain up to about half.
A Grit lead riff with short notes, a Dark stab chord now and then, and a quiet Pad with lots of sidechain.
Automate the master Filter up over the last bar and put a Noise riser there too. Then save it to a pad and do it all again louder.

Open BanaDAW