Overdub

The challenge

I play guitar and bass at home and wanted one place to record ideas, build a backing band and practise, without juggling a full studio suite. A single audio interface, a laptop and a few hours should be enough to go from a riff to a finished mix. Nothing I tried fitted the way I work, so I built the tool myself, and it is a different kind of project from my web work: a native Windows desktop app.

What I built

• A multitrack recorder for guitar, bass and MIDI, written in C# on .NET 9 with WPF and NAudio, recording through ASIO with low latency on a Komplete Audio 2.
• Take lanes and comping, a piano roll with key and scale help, and clickable edit history with automatic backups.
• Drum, guitar and bass machines driven by a step sequencer, with beat presets, swing, humanise, fills and per-step velocity and chance, plus song templates, sections and chords that all the players follow.
• A VST3 plugin host for effects and instruments, and a built-in SFZ sampler for sampled drums, guitars, pianos and orchestral sounds, with a sound library and a lazy-loading sample cache for big packs.
• Practice tools for bass: a fretboard view, a play-along trainer that listens and checks my playing against the line, drills, and a tempo ramp for loops.
• Learning built in: short courses on theory and mixing, an ear trainer, a circle of fifths and progression builder, and a mix check that measures a mix and says what to look at.
• Mixdown with a mastering chain and loudness readout, and export of the song as MIDI and the bass as tab.

Key decisions

• Built around the player, not the studio. The app is organised as record and mix, build a song, learn and sounds, so the next step is always obvious.
• Hear edits while you edit. Drum previews and step indicators give immediate feedback, which keeps ideas moving.
• Open formats. VST3, SFZ, FLAC and MIDI mean the sounds and the music stay portable.