Shruti Bot

Shruti Bot is a shruti box you can actually tune.

Ten reeds, laid out the way a real box is — the low Pa and Sa drone pair, the full middle saptak from Sa to Ni, and the upper Sa. Every reed sits at its just-intonation ratio against the tonic, not the tempered approximation, so the drone locks together the way the instrument is supposed to.

Pull up the bellows and it breathes. At zero no air moves at all and the box is silent; push it up and the drone gets louder and pumps harder, until the breathing turns into an audible tremolo riding on top of the tone. Pressure opens the timbre as well as the volume, so a stroke sounds like air moving rather than a fader going up.

THE REEDS

• Ten stops — Pa and Sa below, Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni across the middle, Sa above

• Just intonation throughout — 3/2, 9/8, 5/4, 4/3, 5/3, 15/8 against the tonic

• A tapered tuning peg on every reed, plus or minus 100 cents, turned by hand

• Detune two neighbouring reeds and they beat against each other — real acoustic summing, not an effect

• A mixer fader per reed, independent of the stops, for balancing what's already sounding

THE KEY

• Any tonic across all twelve pitch classes, octaves 1 through 6

• A peg for each key, arranged as a keyboard

• Every pitch class keeps its own microtonal trim, so you can build a tuning that isn't twelve-tone equal temperament and it stays put

• The current note and its offset are always on screen

MOVEMENT

• Two free-running LFOs on every reed — one for tuning, one for level

• They run at their own rates and drift in and out of phase, so the beating keeps reorganising and the drone never quite repeats

• Set them slow and the box simply sounds alive

THE CHAMBER

• A swept resonance that moves like a body cavity rather than a filter sweep

• Stereo chorus, the point where the drone opens out of the centre

• Tape delay with a real moving head — sliding the time bends the pitch the way tape does, and the repeats darken as they recirculate

• Plate-style reverb from a quarter second to six

TWO INSTRUMENTS

Tap the logo. Shruti Bot 2 replaces the reeds with four analogue oscillators — sine, triangle, saw and pulse — with phase shaping on each, from slow comb sweeps to full PWM. Everything else carries straight over: the same tuning, the same reeds switched on, the same effects. Only the sound source changes.

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