Hacker News Reader

Comment by drumnickydrum | Hacker News Reader

Author here. I’m a professional musician of 15 years transitioning into software development.

With this app I aimed to create an intuitive and usable drum sequencer that would run in the browser . I’ve always wanted to be able to program beats longer than 16 notes and see each instrument playing at the same time.

It’s built using React, Redux, and a fabulous web audio library called Tone.js.

This is the capstone to my learning to code which started in sept 2020. I was thrilled to be able to build something that combined my history in drumming and music production.

Happy to answer any questions!

EDIT: Link sharing was not working right but has been resolved. Share your beats! (You will have to re-save to generate a new url)

EDIT: Part I of the article is live: https://drumnickydrum.medium.com/from-funk-to-functions-da86...

View on HN

As a professional software engineer of ~20 years who's dabbled in music for as long as you've dabbled in software, I'm humbled and impressed. Just wanted to say "great job!", and wish you a long, fulfilling career combining your passions and talents.

Wow thank you so much. I hope it’s as you wish!

Wonderful work! For a software engineer new to the space, your attention to detail and clarity of the implementation truly stand out. Are you planning to open source and/or continue adding features to this app?

The source is open :) https://github.com/drumnickydrum/sequencer64

I can't say what exactly is next for the app. My top priority right now is to get hired as an engineer, and I built this to hone my skills.

My career as a musician came to a standstill last March and I feel I'm now ready to enter the software arena.

FYI, in case this wasn't your intent (I only mention this because you said you were fairly new up top), while you've provided the source you haven't given anyone a license to edit/duplicate/branch it.

Open Source usually implies a license, e.g. (reductively) the MIT ("do whatever you want as long as you credit me"), GPL ("If you use this code, you also have to share your code"), etc.

Check out https://choosealicense.com/ for more info.

Thanks! Yes I am still pretty green so I need the info.

I actually made the same transition about 8 years ago. Coursera filmed this interview about my story (obviously cut down to mostly quotes praising them):

https://youtu.be/Z1lqnyEp38o

Anyway, awkward videos aside, if you want a contact in senior tech roles who was also a professional drummer, feel free to get in touch.

Username is same across most social media, and hn at username .com is my email.

Thx, msg’d you on ig.

I was in basically this exact same spot a few years ago, and built something similar, and showing it off was a big part of my interview process where I got the job that changed my life/career. Wishing you the best. Let me know if there's any way I could help

There is! I’m coming from fifteen years in an unrelated (and wildly different) field. I am actively seeking advice related to landing a job where I would be a good fit. Please email me if you’d like to chat drumnickydrum@gmail.com

lol I built a drum machine too, its a nightmare of bash, perl, c, bc and invokations of sox. in my case, I can't show it off because the code is so bad it would do more harm than good.

I wrapped the entire mess up into an easily called script, and I love it despite the horrors of its internals.

This made me lol. If it makes music it is a force for good

I am a professional SWE and am exploring several music-oriented startup ideas at the moment. I definitely do not promise anything, but would love to stay in touch in case I get funded in the (distant) future. I will message you on GitHub.

I would be thrilled to stay connected. Do reach out.

Really nice samples! Sounds great.

Consider having the space bar toggle playback - would make it so much smoother to use! (used to that from all kinds of music software)

Thx for the suggestion. I've just added it. It's a pwa so close all tabs and refresh a couple times to make sure the changes take effect.

I think it’s well designed, and I really like the analog drum samples (though I think the clap sounds better at G2 instead of C2). I would had made it 4 rows of 16 steps instead of 8 rows of 8 steps, but that’s because I’ve been using Roland grids for so long, that’s what I’m used to working with.

I also wish I could save a pattern as a long link. (MIDI slave sync support would also be nice, but I’m not sure browser sound libraries support that)

Thx! Menu dive a bit and you can re-pitch the clap. There is some, though not robust, MIDI support I will eventually be looking into. What do you mean exactly about saving a pattern as a long link?

It’s possible to make a really long link which stores data in it. For example, here’s a link with an interactive fiction adventure: http://iplayif.com/?story=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ifarchive.org%2Fi...

After typing in “no”, reading the screen, then hitting the space bar, one will see a “>”. At this point, type in “save”.

The link for the game now is much longer, because it includes the entire state of the game in it, i.e.: http://iplayif.com/?story=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ifarchive.org%2Fi...

Wow that site is super fun :) As far as the sequencer, head over to the save menu. If you 'share' your sequence it actually generates a link you can save. (It's not storing the data in the link as the full sequence data is too long at once for a url string.)

Another option is to use base-64 or XML (or even JSON) to store the data in a longish text string that’s still short enough to share online. For example, he’s a really nice ambient “bloom” reverb I use with Valhalla Supermassive (after downloading this free plugin, one can copy the following code then select “paste from clipboard” in Supermassive to load this reverb):

> the full sequence data is too long

Sigh. Ever read an early proposal and think "wow, that's such a bad idea - good thing no one will pick up that"? Very not safe - a young naive me thought that reading early CGI, with its short urls passed on command-line, rather than longer urls on stdin. But people lycosed, and found a page, and were guided by it, and it spread, and... became assumed. Oh well.

Here in the future, with IE gone, IIRC browsers permit 80k, bottlenecked on Safari. Base-64 drops thats towards 60k. Of compressed data. Bzip can do a lot, even with JSON. Especially if you help it out.

There's some robustness cost, with unhappy security gateways and such, but for apps where featureful trumps reliable, we're no longer quite so crippled. Yay.

You should feel really proud! It works flawlessly and way better than other similar projects.

edit: since you came up with this project with less than 1 year of learning how to code, I'm very curious about your music.

@drumnickydrum on instagram to peak at my music career

This was fun. I annoyed my family making a blast beat with the slice tool.

Work great on firefox for android and it look fun.

Keep up the good work !

Thanks :) Make some beats!

Yasss! I love how this illustrates the fact that anyone can get into coding.

I've tried helping career-stuck people learning to code and build apps, but I've found it difficult teaching them everything from the ground up.

As a mostly self taught developer, I do believe it's just matter of dedication and sheer will though, and thank you for proving that right.

Thank you... yes, Persistence! There are many challenges along the way where I came soooo close to giving up.

There is no magic going on. If something works or doesn’t work, it’s in the code.

I think successful musicians already know this struggle so luckily I kept struggling through the hard parts.

> I think successful musicians already know this struggle so luckily I kept struggling through the hard parts.

Love the analogy, it does feel like that with music indeed!

Very cool. How about a shuffle/swing mode?

A knob to vary swing... coming up! thx :)

you should probably know that it loads to a completely black screen using safari.

I believe this is fixed but can't test on my end. Anyone using old version of Safari that doesn't support MediaRecorder (or disabled MediaRecorder), please load the app and let me know if it goes blank.

Bizarre... what is your device/os?

I'm seeing it work fine on Safari on iPad 14.4.2 and Big Sur on an MBP, but I get a blank black screen on another Mac running Mojave.

macbook pro, macOS.

    Error: Media Recorder API is not available in debug.ts

and nothing ends up rendering, all divs are empty.

(editing to add, since I can't reply to the child for some reason):

Mojave, safari 14.1

Wow. Thx for finding this. I'll get on it. Which version of macOS?

ah, it finally let me respond to this comment, sometimes hn is sooo weird :)

safari 14.1 in Mojave. I spend too much time with weird audio stuff to move past Mojave on this laptop unfortunately.

edit:

aha -> looks like you have to turn on the experimental features to get it to work. might be good to have a note for someone who doesn't have that turned on to avoid the black screen.

Been looking into it. Looks like it's an old safari issue related to Media Recorder (for downloading your sequence.) I'll play around to make sure the ux is right regarding this bug.

It works fine for me:

Safari Version 14.0.2 (16610.3.7.1.9)

MacOS Big Sur 11.1

2021 iMac (8-Core Intel Core i7 3.8 GHz)

Respect on the amazing response time for this issue.

Thx, it’s my baby, I want it to work ::sweating:: (I think that bug is fixed)

Super cool, nice work.

sequencer64.com/sequencer/609b4f396c34382a584c6b31

Some dnb fun (174bpm), nifty to see how useful a fresh look can be uniquely effective with the tools of the days.

Oops, my share links seem to be broken. I’ll have a look at this tomorrow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com