Probably the coolest Sound Byte yet, this one will generate drum beats based on probabilities for each sixteenth note in a measure. The sound-set is basic: kick, snare, hat, plus a chime loop that is overlaid for a little melodic flavor. You can tweak the probability of all the steps independently, or just click a button to set them all to new random values. Two “modes” allow you to specify whether you want the kick and snare to ever play at the same time and some simple rules are used to determine the amplitude of each note. I considered putting in panning of some kind, but decided it could go in a later iteration. I may do a bassline generator along the same lines at some point. Check it out!

Eventually, we plan to add a UGen to Minim that will allow you to control the generating speed of any other UGen, but that got me thinking about how you might do something similar with existing components. So, I struck upon the idea of using an Oscil as a looping sampler by using an audio file as the Waveform and setting the frequency of the Oscil to be very low. The fun thing about this is that if you set the Oscil to a negative frequency, the sound will play in reverse. Additionally, I thought it’d be fun to be able to automate the changing of the frequency by having an LFO control the frequency of each Oscil (left and right channels of the original audio file). So here’s a sketch that lets you play with this setup:

I’m picking my way through Real Sound Synthesis for Interactive Applications by Perry R. Cook (one of the authors of the STK) and decided to start making small apps to demonstrate the different kinds of synthesis he covers in the book. This first one let’s you set the variables of a mass-spring-damper system and then trigger it, which is exactly the same as setting the coefficients of a two-pole IIR filter and sending an impulse into it (as it turns out). Check it: