This month I have decided to write the code for a sequencer that will (hopefully) unleash the musician that is hidden deep down inside each one of us. I have used 4 different drums for my demo, but you can use any other sound files, creating nice patterns for bass, piano, guitar, and so on.
What's a sequencer, you ask? It's a computer program that plays a sound sequence using several, smaller sound pieces or midi events. Our dorkish-named SEQ-A can play 1...4 different instruments spread over 16 bars. Let's see it in action; open dummy.wmp and run the level using the script named sequa.wdl.
Hmm... the red led looks ok, but no sound is played. Let's press the "randomize" button.
The things look much better now! You can hear a (hopefully) nice pattern, or you can keep pressing "randomize" until you generate something decent. I was surprised to see that some of the randomly generated patterns sound really good right out of the box.
The good news doesn't stop here; you can click the blue / orange rectangles, activating / deactivating the instruments for each one of the 16 bars in real time. This means that you can either create your patterns from scratch or you can generate a random pattern that sounds good and tweak it until it sounds perfect. The "BPM" (beats per minute) slider will come in handy as well; don't forget to play with it.
Have fun with SEQ-A; I know I did! Oh, and when you get bored with my sounds replace the sound1.wav... sound4.wav files with your own samples.