Playable demo
Scale Drum
A real steel tongue drum on your phone — twenty scales across four drums, every strike synthesized in real time, chord mode so you hear the harmony instead of hunting for it.
I own a steel-tongue drum — a pantam. One day I photographed it, mapped hit zones onto the photo, and started building the instrument into the phone.
The photo is the interface. You’re not tapping abstract buttons — you’re tapping the tongues of my actual drum, calibrated to the pixel. Every sound is synthesized from scratch in Web Audio: no samples, just math shaped until it rang like steel. Velocity-sensitive multi-touch, sympathetic ringing so the drum hums the way the real one does, retap damping, note bends, and a full effects rack — reverb, chorus, filter, EQ, envelope — with savable presets.
It grew into the most mature thing I’ve built: twenty scale types, each living on the drum that fits it — the 8-tongue pantam, a 6-tongue mini drum, and 9-note drums with a centre ding, all with AI-generated instrument art. Chord mode lights up the tongues that belong together so you hear harmony instead of hunting for it, and built-in echo grooves give you something to jam along with. Transpose any scale to whatever root you like.
The whole instrument ships as one self-contained ~1 MB HTML file. That’s why you can play it right here on this page — and it’s now wrapped in a native shell and headed to the App Store as Phone Pantam.
This was the deepest product iteration of my building streak: a 2.5-week sprint of ~45 working sessions, with a living plan document that grew past 100 KB over 25+ build passes — and it hasn’t stopped since. It also spawned a satellite project — the Video Producer — which turned the app’s own screens into 16 finished marketing reels.
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