Groove Pizza | Hacker News Reader

Groove Pizza

apps.musedlab.org

399 pointsadriancooney33 comments

Cool video explaining the concept of "swing" using Groove Pizza: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4EtsPf3X-I

Looks like I can't "turn off" a pizza (for lack of a better term) once I've started using it.

It'd be cool to be able to edit a pizza before it was being played, or save different sets and queue them up.

I've played a bit of Fuser (by Harmonix) and it has a similar vibe. Not exactly the same but I think this could go in a similar direction.

It took me a while to figure out but you actually can by clicking the border around the pizza at the bottom and the color will change showing it’s inactive

I think the buttons underneath the sequencer are supposed to be measures, but they don't seem to be working properly for me. Clicking on them once highlights them - but only sometimes. And then clicking on them again does not unhighlight them - but only sometimes. Other than that this seems fun, I want to try to get around this weird issue cause I'd love to play with this. Maybe I'll try Chrome (currently using Firefox)

Clicking outside of the circle adds/removes that pattern from the sequence. When the sequence is paused, clicking inside of the circle selects that pattern.

It's kind of unintuitive, because when they're "on" the beat cycles through your active pizzas. As someone else commented, you can click on the outer edge to turn them back off.

What this really needs is the capability to edit pizzas when they're not currently being cycled through, so you can queue up new rhythms.

Seeing a circular and linear visualization of a loop pattern side by side made me realize how it makes so much more sense to have it circular. Interesting.

Reminded me a lot about making music for Octavia, from the video game Warframe https://i.imgur.com/vkhymRv.jpg

If it was possible to change the volume of individual notes you could do some pretty sweet groves on this.

Bossa nova: https://apps.musedlab.org/groovepizza/?source=pub&museid=z4A...

Toto - Rosanna: https://apps.musedlab.org/groovepizza/?source=pub&museid=OO2...

If you like this concept and like to dig deeper there's Xronomorph [1]. Don't love Xronomorph's U.I. but it is an interesting concept with some deeper mathematical background around the concepts of "perfect balance" and "well-formedness" of rhythms. The site has some papers and links on those concepts, quite the rabbithole.

1: https://www.dynamictonality.com/xronomorph.htm

Thanks for this! I had no idea this existed and am quite intrigued by it :)

I quickly run into a segmentation fault of macOS though when trying to choose a sample...

This was so much fun and so easy to have a play around with. I found it to be incredibly intuitive - as someone who isn't musically talented but is curious enough to just try stuff out

After trying out the "rock you" special beat, I quickly managed to make what I think is a common rock drum beat - what I would describe as: dum ch dadum dum ch. Then while that was going, I started playing around with that beat - different variations of it, without pausing it at all. It kinda sounded like I was jamming! I carried on playing with it while it was playing the beats and had quite a bit of fun changing the beat and making a drum solo. Unfortunately I was just changing that one pizza - would be cool if you could set it to record it as you change the pizza. I went back and made a cool beat with four pizzas so I could share it here :)

https://apps.musedlab.org/groovepizza/?source=pub&museid=3ge...

Very nice. The UI (on mobile at least) could use some more labels for explanation (or maybe a quick tutorial), but having experience with other beat editors it was simple enough for me to figure out pretty quick: https://apps.musedlab.org/groovepizza/?source=pub&museid=x-b...

I really like the cyclical beat representation. Makes it a lot easier to visualize how everything fits together. Would be neat if more DAWs, drum machines, etc. adopted this layout instead of the normal linear approach.

EDIT: and I only now realized that you can click on the drumset icon in the center of wheel to change the instrument set: https://apps.musedlab.org/groovepizza/?source=pub&museid=q3I...

If you're interested in something similar, look for "Euclidean Sequencer" vsts for your daw.

Kind of fun, I find it fairly intuitive. It's been a long time since I messed around with anything musical. Here's what I came up with: https://apps.musedlab.org/groovepizza/?museid=vcfVeYzxT&

As a musician I'm surprised how much I like the sound of placing beats in a practically random way

https://apps.musedlab.org/groovepizza/?museid=xFlGGuYki&

Wish there was a "randomize" button that would let me input a probability that any given beat should be present and then randomly decide on/off for every node, I feel like that could be an interesting way to explore beatspace.

If I’m understanding your request, Ableton Live will do that for you. You can set probability that it will choose a given beat pattern and now with their latest version you can also set the probability that an individual note will trigger.

Western music (for want of a better term) is so deeply rooted in even 16th notes that almost anything sounds acceptable. I think being limited to 3 curated instruments per pattern helps a lot too.

It’s not just the 16th notes, but that there’s 16 of them. 16/16, or 4/4 if you will. And the adoption of the tresillo (meaning “triplet”, but it’s 3+3+2) and the many variations you can do to it, it’s hard to make 4/4 sound “odd”. It’s possible to do (such as by changing the snare and kick drums to not be “correct”), but popular music tends to avoid that.

Pretty cool. Groove Pizza is definitely approachable and easy to use. I wish the samples sounded better.

It reminds me of the Funklet web sequencer, which has some powerful features but is very unapproachable. I like that Funklet has an extensive catalogue of recreations of famous beats.

https://funklet.com/ (examples)

https://machine.funklet.com/funklet.html (blank)

https://apps.musedlab.org/groovepizza/?museid=5cbGNJsQwN&

Is there a way to copy one bar to the other three without having to click all the little dots again?

https://apps.musedlab.org/groovepizza/?museid=O-xZi0EgX

I think there was an old iOS app that was like this. Can't remember it's name though

That might be Patterning: https://www.olympianoiseco.com/apps/patterning-2/, https://www.olympianoiseco.com/apps/patterning/

Yeah, the colours of the UI look a little different from what I remember, but I think this may have been it. Thanks

fun - https://apps.musedlab.org/groovepizza/?source=pub&museid=POt...

funklet was nice too - https://machine.funklet.com/funklet.html?vals=02402402400000...

https://apps.musedlab.org/groovepizza/?museid=ydHaaIcWz

I wish that there was unlimited slices ...

love the Ui its pretty intuitive

solid work

I hate the interface and have no idea what say the extra pizza buttons under the sequencer do, plus most of its other functions since we've decided against labels, mouseover labels, and instructions.

This is a (simplified) euclidean sequencer where they hid all the labels and turned everything into pizza. It would be better with clear labels or instructions.

but this one allows for audio and midi export so A+ on that. its actually somewhat useful.

I had the same impression at first, but then just played around with it and found it was easy enough to make something that didn’t sound insanely bad, just by pressing random things. It made me want to explore more so I played around with it for a while and eventually kind of figured out what the different things do.

I’ve played with sequencers before and often got turned off by the insane amount of options, but this little demo seems like it has a nice balance to it – not too many options so it becomes overwhelming, and playful enough to afford experimentation. After a minute or two the lack of labels and instructions weren’t an issue for me any longer. Mileage may vary though, I guess.

I'm a big believer that interfaces without labels are antagonistic to users, and require you to know how it works in advance. This can be somewhat mitigated by popping up an instruction box when the user loads the site, but this doesn't do that either, nor does it have a clearly marked 'what the heck' button.

I have three sequencers (more if pocket operators count although they only sequence themselves) within arms length of me at the moment, plus a few different software sequencers I use in my DAW, so I guess I'm just a little more picky.

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