Drum Sequencer

Published: August 08, 2021

Last updated: 5 days ago

This project is the starting point for a much larger project I've envisioned for a long time regarding two passions of mine, music (and music production) and programming languages. The vision, in short, is something like a domain-specifc language (DSL), or similar toolset, for easy, powerful (composable) creation and modification of digital sounds.

The first step was to actually learn the tools for synthesis and playback of digital sounds in the browser, the Web Audio API. I would also need a fun place to playback the products of my envisioned DSL, so a drum sequencer was a perfect first project. The MDN WebAudio API tutorial is literally that, so that's what I loosely followed to build this. The concepts are all here, but the code is totally different to follow React-Redux design principles and also to enable the instrument-building capabilities I have in mind.

The project is currently not on this site(!). Right now it is just the sequencer, with pre-loaded samples and a hard-coded set of parameters exposed. Local audio files can be uploaded to play those back with the same set of parameters. What's next is the hard part, which is designing the tools for instrument-building and exposing those in a coherent UI.