Draw it once.
It moves forever.
Your synths are full of knobs nobody is turning. DUNA draws a curve, points it at any one of them, and plays that movement in time with your music — in AUM, in Loopy Pro, on hardware, on anything that speaks MIDI. It records and loops MIDI notes too, in a piano roll built the same way.
Play the Studio'86 VKO1 · MESA · FUJI Drum · DUNA — play them together in your browserNo timeline required · Works with plug-ins you already own · Nothing to install on the other end
Play it in.
Fix it in the roll.
DUNA moves knobs, and it plays notes. NOTES is a loop of MIDI notes, one to sixty‑four bars, locked to the same beat as every lane. Press REC, play — from your host, from hardware, or from the keys right in the rack — and hear it come straight back round. Then open the piano roll and shape it.
Tap it in
Tap to place a note, drag to size it, tap it again to take it away. Snap from 1/4 to 1/32, triplets, or off.
Move whole phrases
Box a run, drag it in time and pitch together, pull any note's end to resize. The shape of a chord never gets squashed.
Paint the dynamics
One stroke across the lane under the roll is a crescendo. Brighter notes are louder, so you can read it at a glance.
The moves you reach for
Quantise at any strength, transpose by semitone or octave, duplicate, legato, and ×2 to turn one bar into two you can vary.
One gesture, one step
However long you dragged for, undo takes back exactly that. A whole recorded take undoes as one.
Sample‑accurate
Inside a host every note lands on its own sample, not the edge of an audio buffer — and nothing is ever left hanging when you edit a note mid‑ring.
A keyboard in the rack.
Two octaves of real multi‑touch keys sit under the loop — chords work, slide for a run, strike lower on a key to play it louder. Held notes grow on screen as you play.
| Overdub / Replace | Add to the loop, or clear it the moment your first note lands. |
| Record quantise | Starts snap to the grid as they land; the length you played is kept. |
| Any input | Your host's keyboard, a hardware controller, or DUNA's own keys. |
| Its own channel | Point the notes at one synth and the lanes at another. |
| How long | 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 or 64 bars, and up to 2,048 notes. ×2 doubles the loop and repeats what is in it. |
One lane.
One knob.
Moving itself.
A lane is somebody turning one knob for you, forever. You tell it three things: what shape to move in, how long one pass takes, and which knob. That's the whole instrument.
A wave, a ramp, a stepped random — or a curve you draw with your finger. The picture in the lane is the shape.
From a 32nd to sixteen bars. Give two lanes different lengths and they pull against each other for twelve bars before lining up again.
Any parameter of any plug-in, your mixer, or a hardware synth on a MIDI cable.
There is no play button, because your host already has one. A lane has no position of its own — it works out where it should be from the beat. Bar 3, beat 2 always gives the same point in the shape. So press play and every lane, the arp and your notes start together, from the top; press stop and DUNA holds still. Nothing drifts, and nothing needs restarting.
Draw it. Bend it.
Watch it play.
Tap to add a point. Drag it. Grab the ring between two points and bend the line into a curve. Hold a point to delete it. A second finger anywhere drops into fine adjust, for when a nudge is too much.
Freehand, straight onto the grid. When you lift, the stroke is tidied — the shape stays, the redundant points go.
Rubs out every point you drag over, not just the nearest. The ends always survive.
Rule a straight ramp across any span in one drag.
Sixteenths across, eighths up and down. Off when you want it loose.
The white dot rides the curve as it plays, so you always know what is being sent right now.
Move it once.
It keeps moving.
Press REC, arm a lane, and play the move with your finger or a hardware knob. There is no mode to choose: it writes while you are holding the control and nowhere else. A recorded take is an ordinary curve, so you can open it afterwards and tidy it by hand.
Desktop DAWs offer four record modes. Three of them already exist elsewhere here and do the job better.
Every lane has one. It offsets the curve without destroying it, and it is always there.
Redraw a region in the editor, where you can see exactly what you are changing.
Bind a knob with LEARN CC and you are turning a real control while DUNA writes it down.
One gesture.
Many destinations.
Draw a route across the grid and DUNA walks it in time. The walk gives an X and a Y, and both are modulation sources — point a lane at either and it follows that axis. One drawn gesture can move a filter and a delay at once, each with its own depth and its own destination.
Lay a path of up to 64 cells. It loops from the beat, so it needs no start and cannot drift.
Your finger takes over and the drawing waits. Let go and the path resumes — the drawing is never lost.
Glide interpolates for a smooth sweep. Step holds each cell, which is the rhythmic version.
Pad X and Pad Y are just sources, so everything else — depth, trim, resolution — still applies.
An arp for synths
that have none.
DUNA already sits in the MIDI chain, which makes this a natural thing for it to own: notes arrive, it holds them, and re-emits them on the beat. Switch it off and notes pass straight through untouched — a MIDI processor that swallowed notes while idle would break the chain it sits in.
Up, down, up‑down, random, down‑up, as‑played, chord and converge. As‑played follows the order you pressed the keys, not pitch.
Keeps it running after you let go, so you can play over the top or reach for something else.
1/4 down to 1/64 with triplets, one to four octaves, gate, swing, ratchets up to four per step, and accents.
Driven by the same host beat as every lane, so it locks to your set and to your automation with nothing to set up.
128 steps,
or 16,384.
A slow filter sweep on ordinary MIDI climbs in audible stairs — there are only 128 values to go round. Tap a lane to HI‑RES and it switches to pitch bend, which carries 16,384. The sweep goes glassy, and the receiving app needs no changes at all.
It speaks the one language
every plug-in understands.
A plug-in can't reach inside another plug-in — every one is sealed in its own process. So DUNA sends MIDI, and your host does the introduction. That indirection is exactly why it works with everything you already own, including the gear on your desk.
Load DUNA next to your instrument
It goes in a MIDI slot rather than a channel — it makes no sound of its own.
Start your host's MIDI learn
On whichever knob you want to move. AUM, Loopy Pro, apeMatrix, Audiobus and Cubasis all expose every parameter a plug-in publishes.
Press MIDI LEARN
The lane sweeps its destination across the full range — exactly what a learn function is waiting for. It binds on the spot.
Switch the lane on
That's it. The knob now follows the shape, in time, forever.
Hosts save their mappings with the session — a one‑time setup, not something you redo.
Small, exact, and out of the way.
Plays when your host plays
Lane position comes from the host's beat, so lanes, the arp and your notes are always in step with each other and with your session — they start when the transport starts and hold still when it stops.
Lengths that pull apart
A three-bar lane against a four-bar one takes twelve bars to come back round, and never repeats the same way in between.
It only sends changes
A value that hasn't moved isn't transmitted, and every lane has a rate ceiling. A full sweep is exactly 128 messages, not thousands.
See it at a glance
Every lane draws its own shape, sampled through the same engine that plays it — so what you see cannot drift from what you hear.
A second finger
Precision without zooming: hold a second finger anywhere and every drag slows to a fifth of its travel.
Not just apps
Anything on a MIDI interface is a destination. Set the lane's controller to match your synth's manual and it moves too.
Drag a lane by its grip
Order the rack however you want to read it. A lane carries its destination, curve and name with it — only its position changes.
Including two greyscale
DUSK and DAYLIGHT in colour, BASALT and GYPSUM in black and white — where every distinction the others make with hue is made with value instead — SUMI, black ink on washi paper, and ALCHEMY, the marigold and aubergine of a late-sixties film poster, with a lavender shadow printed out of register.
Banks you can recall
Name a set of lanes and drop it into any session. Shared between the app and the plug-in, so a preset saved in one shows up in the other.
Its own MIDI port
On the Mac and on iOS, DUNA publishes a MIDI port and can send straight into other apps — with a view that shows you exactly what is connected.
Built native.
| Formats | AUv3 MIDI processor · standalone app |
| Platforms | iOS · iPadOS · macOS (Mac Catalyst) |
| Lanes | Up to 16, each independent |
| Sources | Drawn curves · sine, triangle, ramp, saw, square, sample‑and‑hold · XY pad X and Y |
| Lane lengths | 1/32 · 1/16 · 1/8 · 1/4 · 1/2 · 1 – 16 bars |
| Notes | A loop of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 or 64 bars · up to 2,048 notes · its own MIDI channel |
| Arp | 8 patterns · 1/4 to 1/64 with triplets · 1‑4 octaves · hold, gate, swing, ratchets, accents |
| Output | 7‑bit CC · 14‑bit CC pairs · pitch bend (16,384 steps) |
| Recording | One button — it writes while you hold the control, from a finger or a MIDI knob |
| Clock | Host tempo and time signature, or its own |
| Engine | Header‑only C++17, real‑time safe, allocation‑free |
| Interface | SwiftUI · six themes, two of them greyscale · three layout densities |
See it, not just read it.
Short video walkthroughs of DUNA in action. More going up as they're made — this becomes a playlist once there's more than one.
The one that moves the others
Four instruments from one studio. Three of them make sound and light from the same shader core; DUNA is the one that moves them — and every other plug‑in and synth you own, since all it needs is MIDI.
Draw a curve, point it at any knob in any plug‑in, and it plays that movement in time, forever. The only one here that makes no sound.
A synth you can see. MESA renders a shader offscreen and reads each frame's luminance as a single‑cycle waveform.
Sixteen wavetable voices, each cut from its own scan row through a live shader. Swap the image and the whole kit re‑cuts.
Where it started. Pad‑based live visuals and 53 effects, plus the node editor that writes the .vkograph files the family reads.
Stop turning knobs
you could have drawn.
DUNA is an AUv3 plug‑in and a standalone app for iPhone, iPad and Mac. One purchase, both.
Requires iOS/iPadOS 17.6 or macOS 15.4