Electronic Music Tools with JavaScript: Week 3

Week 3 - Make a Drum Machine

This week focuses on making a drum machine and introduces a variety of techniques:

• Loading and playing an audio sample.
• Timing in JavaScript
• Making a sequencer UI with NexusUI

My Drum Machine

I made a simple drum machine with 7 different sounds, a tempo control and adjustable sequence length. Samples are taken from tidalcycles' Dirt-Samples repository. I had a lot of fun making it so I will probably put some time into making a more fully-featured version at some point. I'm thinking selectable samples for each channel, channel volume levels, unequal sequence lengths for polyrhythms and randomly generated sequences.

Thoughts on Week 3

My favourite week yet, things keep getting more fun! It is really awesome to be able to make music with a completely flexible tool as the possibilities are endless. Unlike buying an instrument making a software instrument allows you to really tinker and open up new avenues for musical exploration.

What's Next?

Algorithmic music generation! I'm looking forward to this week the most. I'm not a very good composer myself so let's see how good my automatically generated music sounds.