Pastry Open Pastry

A visual controller for Strudel

Make music with patterns. No code required.

Pastry is a music studio in your browser. Place beats on a grid, pick chords that fit, and shape the sound with a few knobs. Pastry writes the Strudel code and plays it live.

Open Pastry See how it works

Free to use. No account. Works best on a desktop browser.

The Pastry studio. A top bar holds play, tempo, swing, and key. Below are starter templates, four large knobs, a live sound display, and a drum grid.

What it does

Three panels. Use one, or all of them.

Each panel suits a different way of working. Show the ones you want and hide the rest.

Play

Start from a template and shape it

Pick lo-fi, house, ambient, or techno. Four knobs change the whole track at once: energy, brightness, space, and drive. Pads mute and unmute each part.

  • Five starter templates
  • A live display of the sound
  • No music theory needed
The Play panel with template cards, knobs for energy, brightness, space, and drive, a live sound display, and mute pads for drums, bass, chords, and melody.

Build

Write your own parts on a grid

Add tracks for drums, bass, chords, and melody. Click a step to place a drum hit. Draw notes on a piano roll. Choose a chord for each bar.

  • Every note stays in the key and scale you choose
  • Change the key and every track follows
  • Shuffle fills a track with a new idea
  • Filter, reverb, delay, and more on each track
The Build panel. A bass track shows notes on a piano roll with note names. A chord track shows one chord per bar: A minor seventh, F major seventh, C, and G.

Code

See the code, and write your own

Pastry shows the Strudel code it writes, and updates it as you work. It is a clear way to learn how Strudel patterns are built.

  • Copy the code or open it in Strudel
  • Add a code track and write a pattern by hand
  • Turn any track into code when you outgrow the grid
The Code panel beside the tracks. It lists the generated Strudel program, with one commented block for drums, bass, chords, and a hand-written code track.

How it works

Every control writes a line of Strudel.

Pastry holds no sound engine of its own. It turns your project into a Strudel program and hands it over.

  1. 1

    You move a control

    Toggle a step, draw a note, or turn a knob. Pastry stores the change in your project.

  2. 2

    Pastry writes the code

    The whole project becomes one Strudel program. Notes are stored as scale degrees, so they stay in key.

  3. 3

    Strudel plays it

    Strudel swaps in the new pattern in time with the music. The loop never stops while you edit.

A kick drum and two chords, as Pastry writes them
// 124 bpm, A minor. Made with Pastry.
setcpm(124/4)

stack(
  // Drums
  s("bd ~ ~ ~ bd ~ ~ ~ bd ~ ~ ~ bd ~ ~ ~").bank("RolandTR909"),
  // Chords
  n("<[0,2,4,6] [5,7,9,11]>").scale("A3:minor")
    .s("supersaw").room(0.25),
)

Credit

Built on Strudel.

Pastry is a wrapper. The sound engine, the pattern language, and the way patterns change in time all come from Strudel, a live coding environment for the browser by Felix Roos, Alex McLean, and many contributors. Strudel brings the TidalCycles pattern language to JavaScript.

Everything Pastry makes is plain Strudel code. If you enjoy Pastry, open your project in Strudel and keep going. Strudel can do far more than a grid can show.

Visit strudel.cc Learn Strudel

Pastry is an independent project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Strudel or TidalCycles.

Privacy and safety

Your music stays in your browser.

No account, no analytics

Pastry has no sign-in, no tracking scripts, and no server that stores your work.

Saved on your device

Projects save in your browser. You can also export a project as a file and import it later.

Links carry the project

A share link holds the whole project inside the link itself. Nothing is uploaded.

Shared code stays off

Hand-written code from a link or a file never runs until you read it and switch it on.

Two outside services are used. Fonts load from Google Fonts. Samples load from GitHub when a sound first plays.

Press play.

Pick a template and you will hear music in a few seconds.

Open Pastry