Beat Maker

Beat Maker is a sixteen-step groovebox drawn as a chunky piece of hardware: rubber pads that glow when they fire, rotary knobs with little position marks, a small green display counting the tempo, and a lit column that sweeps across the grid in time with the sound. Six drum lanes run down the front — kick, snare, closed hat, open hat, clap and percussion — each with its own colour, its own level and its own mute. Tap a pad to put a hit on that step; drag your finger across a row to paint a whole run of them.

Under the drums sit two piano-roll strips. The bass strip covers two octaves and the melody strip is locked to the scale you pick — major, minor, pentatonic or blues — so whatever you draw stays in key. Notes can run from one to four steps, and the chord button stacks a triad on every note you place. Five synth voices cover both strips: a round sub, a detuned saw, a short pluck, a glassy bell and a hollow square. Every drum kit is synthesised too, from the deep 808 box and a dry techno machine to lo-fi tape, an eight-bit chip set, jazz brushes, tropical percussion and orchestral hits. Nothing is sampled; the box builds every sound as you press it.

Four patterns, A to D, chain into a song in any order you like. Tempo runs from 60 to 180, swing pushes the off-beats late, and a filter, a tempo-synced delay and a plate reverb sit on the master along with a compressor that keeps the level honest. Eight live pads let you play over the top while the loop runs, snapped to the beat or loose. Six built-in tracks show what the box can do, your own are kept in your browser, and Export writes the whole chained song out as a WAV file you can keep. It plays with a mouse, with a keyboard — space starts it, arrows move a cursor, the number keys hit the live pads — or with two thumbs on a phone.