#HOW TO USE A STEP SEQUENCER HOW TO#
#HOW TO USE A STEP SEQUENCER FREE#

The waveform refers to what the sound wave looks like on an oscilloscope, whereas the envelope refers to how that sound changes over time. The timbre (or individual tonal quality) of any instrument, analog or digital, is determined by both the waveform and the envelope of the generated sound. Tangential quick and dirty acoustics primer: To overcome this, weвЂ™ll create one Synth per note available, and store them in an array. A Synth is monophonic, meaning it can only play one note at a time. The most simple and straightforward instrument provided by Tone.js is the Synth. Create elements in the DOM to visually represent everything with the ability to interact with the grid to turn notes on and off.Write a loop function that will read the grid notation and trigger the synths accordingly.This will function as quasi sheet music and will tell the synths when to play a tone.

Create a grid consisting of multiple sub-arrays within a parent array.Create the synths needed to generate sound.Our design process for the step sequencer is as follows: This is not intended to be an all-encompassing explanation of Tone.js but rather a walkthrough of how I approached making my sequencer.ДЇYI: this post assumes the reader has some familiarity with music theory I hope to (partially) remedy that issue with this post and help anyone working with Tone in the future.

#HOW TO USE A STEP SEQUENCER HOW TO#

The documentation can be a bit confusing though, and I found myself spending hours clicking between pages, trying to understand how to get all the pieces to fit together. Tone greatly simplifies a number of things when trying to programmatically generate music.

#HOW TO USE A STEP SEQUENCER FREE#

To overcome this, I used a free web audio framework called Tone.js as the basis for my project. As explained in this excellent writeup by Monica Dinculescu, having consistent and regularly timed events can be difficult to achieve in Javascript due to it being a single-threaded language. Each step can then be used to trigger a specific sound and/or note. A step sequencer is an electronic device that divides a measure into predetermined subdivisions or вЂњstepsвЂќ.

How to use a step sequencer