What is Drambo Visual
Introduction
Drambo Visual is a modular environment for creating real-time visuals inside Drambo. It lets you work with images, motion, and visual structure using the same patching mindset that already defines the rest of the app. As an integral part of the Drambo ecosystem, the audio DSP and Visual modules speak the exact same language, allowing control signals to cross-modulate seamlessly between sound and sight. Some parts of Visual are immediate and patch-based, where you connect modules and shape results directly. Other parts go deeper into programmable behavior and structured systems.
The environment currently launches with a foundational toolkit of 42 modules, each featuring an open architecture that can be custom-coded or composed of other modules. Backed by dozens of presets to spark your creativity, this is only the beginning, as the library will continue to grow over time.
The easiest way to approach it is not as one large feature set, but as a set of visual worlds you can enter depending on how you want to work.
| The first world is content world. This is where you start from existing visual material such as Text, Image, and Video. In this world, the source already has an identity, and your job is to place it, transform it, layer it, color it, distort it, or combine it with other content. This is the most immediate part of Drambo Visual and usually the best place to begin. |  |
| The second world is shader world. This is where visuals are defined by computing what each pixel should be, rather than by arranging existing content. That makes shaders especially good for fullscreen generative imagery, evolving textures, procedural patterns, distortions, and other effects that behave continuously across the image. In Drambo, shader behavior can be built and modified modularly through Shader Kit modules, which makes this world much more approachable than raw shader coding alone. It also enables one of the strongest ideas in Drambo Visual: textures can act as per-pixel modulation sources, so one image can control another spatially and dynamically. |  |
| The third world is scene world, handled by a single Scene module. This is where you build visuals by drawing, generating, and animating objects in 2D or 3D. Instead of defining the image pixel by pixel, you work with elements that exist as objects with position, structure, relationships, and evolving state. This makes Scene well suited for more advanced visual systems and richer animation logic. Because of that, Scene goes further than the other worlds into stateful behavior and coding. |  |
Shader and Scene are the most open-ended parts of Drambo Visual, and both are designed to support anything from simple starting points to highly specialized presets. Both can be coded, which is what gives them their depth and flexibility. The difference is that shader creation can also be approached modularly through Shader Kit modules, letting users build and modify per-pixel behavior without starting from raw code, while Scene is the place for more advanced coded visual systems built around objects, structure, and state.
Signal Flow and Signal Types
Drambo Visual is organized around signal flow. At the top level, visual patches are built by connecting modules that generate, transform, combine, and display visual signals. The main visual signal type is the Texture. This is the core image-carrying signal in Drambo Visual: a source creates a texture, processing modules modify or combine textures, and the Projector module acts as the endpoint that displays the final visual result. So when users connect visual modules together, they are usually routing texture flow through the patch until it reaches the projector.
Alongside textures, Shader Kit introduces additional signal types used specifically inside shader construction. These are not general-purpose visual connections for the whole library. They are shader-only extension signals that help define per-pixel behavior, such as coordinates, color values, masks, and other intermediate shader data. In other words, Texture is the main visual signal type across Drambo Visual, while other Shader Kit signal types exist only within shader world to build and modulate shader logic.
Modulation and DSP integration
Across all three worlds, modulation is what brings visuals to life. Drambo Visual becomes expressive when images, pixels, and scenes are set in motion by signals.
Per-frame modulation
Most parameters in visual modules can be driven by existing Drambo audio or modulation signals, with their values sampled once per frame. Just as in audio patches, parameters can be driven by LFOs, envelopes, automation, p-locks, sequencers, clocks, random sources, and audio-reactive signals.
Per-pixel modulation
In shader world - with Shader and Shader processor modules, parameters can be modulated not only by regular Drambo signals, but also by Textures and Masks (Masks are monochrome textures). Unlike normal modulation, which changes a parameter uniformly, per-pixel modulation varies across the image, so each pixel can respond differently. That means a texture can act not just as something to display, but as a spatial control source that shapes color, motion, distortion, opacity, or pattern across the screen.
This is where Shader Kit becomes especially powerful. Instead of using a shader as a fixed block, you can build and modify its pixel logic modularly by combining generators, math, coordinates, masks, and textures. The result is spatial modulation: one area of the image can drive a parameter up while another drives it down, enabling detailed and organic behavior that a single global knob cannot produce.
Performance and Rendering
Drambo Visual runs on the GPU using Apple Metal. Visual processing, shader evaluation, texture operations, and rendering are designed to take advantage of the GPU’s parallel architecture, which makes the system suitable for complex real-time visuals. The rendering pipeline is highly optimized to keep visual generation, processing, and display efficient, so even advanced patches can remain responsive and perform smoothly in real time.
Please bear in mind: The most GPU-intensive module is the 3D Shader, which uses a demanding technique called raymarching. While other modules render smoothly at full-screen 60 FPS, complex 3D Shader presets may need to be run at a lower preview quality (adjustable in the module settings). This setting is automatically bumped up to high quality during export.
For 3D scenes, you can also use the Scene module, which is based on vertex shaders and is perfectly suited for high-quality, real-time rendering.
When your composition becomes too complex for real-time rendering, you can lower the resolution or frame rate, then export high-quality audio and video in the background.