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Sampulator.com – make and record beats with your keyboard (sampulator.com)
97 points by brianzelip on Jan 24, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 57 comments




I'm really enjoying this. Great set of default samples, it seems to limit the paradox of choice.

I also can't resist sharing mine:

http://sampulator.com/skandermz/cruisin


That's cool. Whenever I play with things like this, I always end up just making a mess.


Takes me back to when I was a teenager :)

I gotta share mine as well: http://sampulator.com/melvins_shozin/melody-is-symfony

Initially I wanted to call it "Less is More" since I was mostly deleting notes because they convoluted things. But I was also inspired making this sound snippet by the first melody track on the top, hence Melody is Symfony.

I don't know what you plan to do with it but I just had the perfect hour of my life. No feedback on that part. I also don't know how you could surprise me to keep that level up since the constraints in samples that I needed to take was key for having the perfect hour (also mentioned by skndr as "paradox of choice").


Can't resist, one more. Apparently a perfect 2nd hour a snippet in another genre.

http://sampulator.com/melvins_shozin/a-state-of-


Found a 'bug' so if the author is here somewhere, please help :) And it is not your fault, it is Facebook's fault. When I share the link on Facebook http://sampulator.com/melvins_shozin/a-state-of- then Facebook truncates the final - which makes the link invalid.


This is really nice.


Absolutely epic... need more samples though :D Here's mine, http://sampulator.com/lemiffe/goat-cheese--crackers


"Goat Cheese & Crackers" is an epic name.


Very cool!

Here's what I came up with.

http://sampulator.com/vguidry3/smooth-operator

Edit: turn the metronome off by clicking on it, that two circles that alternately light up.


I'm loving this, here's my take. http://sampulator.com/cryptojuice/slowjam



Wow! Love that!


Very nice!


First of all, this is awesome!

Maybe my ears are messed up, but I seem to be hearing that the "Keys" sounds are interrupting each other, in a way that none of the other sounds seem to do. That is, if you play two of them simultaneously, only one will be heard. If you play one a fraction behind another the first will be preempted. Normally the "Keys" sounds have a lovely sustain, so this disappoints.

This is on Chrome 47.0.2526.110.


Yep, same for the 808's. They are super fat chords and wouldn't work at the same time. I set it up that way to keep everything in tune :)


I hadn't noticed the 808s because they all sound like "Kick 2" to me. b^)


since 808s are a rather low frequency, headphones or some speakers with bass are a must


There goes my day. First attempt: http://sampulator.com/Lazer/test


This is great, only thing missing cowbell. Here's a basic house beat: http://sampulator.com/paulcretu/house


Great way to spend a Sunday morning!

http://sampulator.com/davehunteruk/tribal-beats


agreed. super fun!

here's what I came up:

http://sampulator.com/lusenrc/saturday-night

http://sampulator.com/lusenrc/saturday-night-2

(turn the metronome off by clicking on the two circles on the right side that alternately light up)


soo good ︎


I'd love to see something that's like a combination of this with wavepot.com


Tried to make a polyrhythm, but not enough time resolution to get it right: http://sampulator.com/tr_babb/chuck-it

:\


very nice. here's mine after 30 minutes of complete immersion.

http://sampulator.com/rhabal/choollax


This is really awesome. The UI and UX are pretty much perfect.

Some suggestions for future features:

- Easier way of doing layering

- Easy way to swap out the instruments would also be cool.

- An open source, self-hostable version would also be nice.


thank you. library of instruments is in the works


Also, a keyboard shortcut to delete/reset the current loop (if I made a mistake early on) would be cool, too.


great idea.

now if you press 'esc' it will stop recording and delete the loop


Also, some way to disable snap-to-grid. I'd like to be able to play triplets, or play with swing.


Thanks.

Any plans to allow people to save remixes of other people's songs?


@stevespaced playing tunes works fine on my mobile Chrome, I just have to activate "View desktop site" everytime. You should integrate a mobile player :)


i will once i'm happy with the UX of producing on mobile :)



Tangentially, is there software which could enable me to make electronic music (preferably on linux) with only a keyboard? Something quite like this website.


this is utterly amazing. whoever the programmer is, holler at me, I'd love to help you make it a collaborative realtime beat-making engine, i.e. so people can contribute to the same song at the same time. I'm sure you've already thought about this. It's about time for a javascript collaborative beat-making engine to take off, especially with midi support on the horizon or here already (i forget).


Not the programmer but collaborative beat making would be absolutely amazing.


I wish someone would bring back the greatness of real-time music sharing from Turntable.fm, except maybe with instruments you could pick up and jam with. Maybe each person gets 1-2 loops, and 4-5 people get to be up on stage at once. Everyone else just gets little avatars that party.


Full real-time collaboration would be so annoying with various latencies. Would be super difficult to set up, but I've always wanted a way to do something like that too.


its me :) @stevespaced on twitter. lots of good stuff in the works


Very nice! Could you add Tap Tempo button?


This is awesome. Good work. I just hope there's some sort of "autotune for beats" feature where I can effortlessly add 4/4 beats of kicks for example.


Cool if it didn't lag the browser so badly


It only works with qwerty :(


latest version of Chrome (48.0.2564.82) should support all keyboard layouts


Cool, is it open source?


also, what libraries and tools did you use to make this?


just web audio api's and javascript from scratch. instruments were recorded or created by me


That key pad was a good choice. And u added the rick Ross 'huh'! Hilarious! Good work man.


Cycle.js would make for the perfect view framework for this giving the streaming nature of loops and observing new hits added to the grid:

http://cycle.js.org

We should use Meteor, RethinkDB or ClojureScript + Om Next + Datomic for realtime subscriptions and syncing of collaborating users.

...hows midi support looking these days? Is it fully functional in Chrome?


also, i think the real opportunity here lies in making it open source and making it all programmable. so literally you can program and enhance the damn thing as you use it--at least be able to one-click import extensions from NPM and github. see what im saying. given how many people know javascript, and how often programmers also have musical interests, this could be big.

it should be a codeable music creation platform. a console while making those beats could do a lot of stuff. you write an API to appergiate hits for example:

arp(4, 16, 'hi-hat') ....16th notes for a bar.

plugins could be made to collect stats, and generate visualizations. lots of stuff.

...but it all starts from being able to live code this collaboratively and remotely. ...u gotta use a single state store like Redux or what you can do with Om Next so you can syncronize events between all connected clients and so you can replay it after each keyup eval. It probably should just be made with React + Redux since so many people know that. If you did that, you'd get so many people using this.

That said I'm in the middle of building a collaborative live-coding platform for React + Redux. And your project would be the perfect pilot project to show off the platform. And basically both win.

...i know ur likely thinking about the direction of all this and whether u wanna open source it or not. But you should--its where u stand to gain the most. It's not like there isn't a plethora of commercial music production software that will be better than it for some time. U need the support of a large open source team to beat those guys out.

anyway, think about it. when u open source it, i'll contribute it. React + Redux baby! Or perhaps Cycle. Although I'd say ClojureScript + Om Next, except that will likely get less contribution since CLJS is foreign to most people.


What you're describing already kind of exists with Overtone (Clojure): http://overtone.github.io/


So awesome, thanks for the link. Guess we could probably reuse a lot of clojure code.


Not sure if you'd you like to use https://github.com/eorroe/NodeList.js over jQuery??


No cowbell.


awesome




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