Nearly getting scooped by Loopseque lit a fire under me to get some more concept images for my thesis app together. So here are some examples of the beat programming lessons that form the intellectual heart of my project. The general idea is that you’re given an existing drum pattern, a famous breakbeat or something more generic. Some of the beats are locked down, guaranteeing that anything you do will sound musical. Click each one to see it bigger.
First of all, here’s a lesson based on “Take Me To The Mardi Gras” by Bob James.
You tap the text boxes to dismiss them and get started. The kick and snare are locked, and you can modify the existing hi-hat and bell patterns as you see fit. You can also play with the tempo, swing and drum sounds.
Here’s a lesson on making dance beats. You’re given a generic techno pattern with the kick drum locked. You add or remove other drum sounds as you see fit.
The lesson on the Funky Drummer works a bit differently. The first two beats of the pattern are locked down. Your job is to customize the other six.
Here’s the Funky Drummer lesson without the text boxes:
Having learned the classics and the cliches, this exercise is designed to break you out of conventional thinking. Every possible beat is activated, producing a hellish cacophony. You create a beat entirely by removing drum sounds.
And of course, you can always program your own patterns from scratch if you so choose.
Most of this still needs implementing, of course, which is the interesting and difficult part. Stay tuned.
Dear Ethan, What a wonderful work. Can i get a PDF copy of the Thesis ?
Regards,
Abdul
Sure thing! https://www.dropbox.com/s/y8r0hevm24nkgj8/ethan%20hein%20thesis.pdf?dl=0
Thank you so much Ethan
That dart board shape is a pretty original looking interface for a musical app, especially for drums. Nice work Ethan.
Great work.
Pay attention to symmetry of the patterns, especially in the house-music and other modern styles.
Round interface allows you to see the harmony and mathematical perfection of musical structure.
That’s amazing ))
I attempted to represent the locked cells with an overlaid dot pattern. At this resolution it just looks like a weird moire. I was thinking of thin diagonal white lines overlaid instead, but those were too annoying to implement with my limited graphic design skills. The final thing will probably depend on what’s easiest to render in iOS.
I would very much like users to be able to do beats synced to loops of actual music. It hadn’t occurred to me to use something like the Echo Nest API, but that makes perfect sense. I’ll throw it onto the ever-expanding feature wish list…
Very cool! I like how you start with music present, but also present designs that are fully additive (starting from a blank template) and fully subtractive (starting from a sound mass).
How does your UI visually differentiate which patterns are “locked” vs. open for input?
The way you display the tune’s metadata reminds me a bit of what can be provided via EchoNest’s Remix and other related APIs… any thoughts about connecting to those and enabling users to perform patterns on top of the actual songs? This could be done with Spotify or Rdio or even YouTube integration and beat sync’ing to the audio.