Two Build modes, found by playing

Shruti started as a reference: pick a raga, see its notes. Playing with it showed me I needed it the other way round too.

Two gaps, both found mid-practice

The first: over a session I’d settle on notes that sat right against the drone, without knowing what I’d made. The app could only answer if I already knew the answer. Your own raga turns it around. Every note goes quiet except Sa, I tap the ones I’m playing, and a panel answers in plain words: This is Bhupali, or Close to Bilawal, missing Ni.

The second: trying a new tuning means retuning two strings by hand, which is a lot of effort for a hunch. Your own tuning suggests named voicings that suit the raga’s mood and plays each one as a harp strum before I touch a peg. The good ones I keep.

One button, not two

They started as two buttons. On the phone the second one crowded the control bar, so I compared five placements in a live prototype and kept one: a single Build menu holding both modes, lit while either is on.

What the phone taught me

The polish came from playing on the phone, not from the spec. I picked the harp sound on a listening page over two rounds, and dropped drive and reverb because they fuzzed on the phone’s speaker. The first strum often came out mashed: the speaker takes about 0.7 seconds to wake, and three queued notes landed at once. Now each strum is mixed into a single clip, and a silent loop keeps the speaker awake while the ideas are open.

None of that was in the plan. A spec can say what a feature does; only using it tells you how it should feel.