Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
Drum Synthesis in JavaScript (nickwritesablog.com)
96 points by trypwire 1791 days ago
7 comments

Wait, why is there no "play with it here" github.io page? This shouldn't require anyone to build anything just to play with it? O_o
It's coming ;)
Awesome stuff!

Drum synthesis is one of those rabbit holes where you can obsess for a long time, when instead you can find good enough sounds quickly and should probably just use them!

I wonder how many collective hours people have burned in trying to synthesize the 909. Here's one cool video of getting it in Reaktor (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A_AWH3SgM84)... way cool as a project, but the ROI if everyone did it lol.

I've been using all my spare hours the past week spinning on trying to synthesis the snare used in the original Amen Break using Modo Drum to no avail. Like I said... Rabbit hole and I should probably just use samples like everyone else :(

Really depends on your end goal.

I've spent a lot of time synthesizing drums I could have sampled, but I'm a lot faster and more precise at synthesizing whatever I need now.

If you just want to make the air shake, a quick way is to turn on the radio :D

The kick, I'm fine. Getting the 909 snare on the Rytm is impossible for me, and hitting the original Amen Break kit's snare on MODO Drum is proving difficult (and yes, I've brought the tempo back to the original bpm) but still not close :(
Thanks! Oh yea, such a rabbit hole.

I started trying to synthesize a snare as part of this library and blog post and got lost in the weeds so quickly. I ended up skipping it for now but will surely come back to it eventually

Time consuming, but fun no doubt :)

I've been wondering if machine learning or metaheuristics could be used to get close to an input sound. I've been toying with this idea using MIDI CC with a Rytm.

This is cool. If the author is reading this: consider adding some sound files to your post?
Not the author, but here's something I put together about 8 years ago using the web audio API to synthesize analog drum sounds, specifically modeled from the Boss DR-110: https://www.bitrotten.com/dr110/webaudio/

(See also https://github.com/leviathant/BossDR110/tree/feature/synthes...)

This looks great, I'm definitely going to try it again when I'm on the desktop
Awesome! Thanks for sharing
Thanks, and yes I totally agree (OP here). I looked into it for a brief minute: I'm using Ghost Blog to host my articles and I didn't see an easy way to attach the media there directly. The available options seemed to involve embedding a Souncloud link or so, which was enough to deter me at the time.

If anyone has ideas for simple audio clip sharing in a Ghost blog, I'd love to hear

Record an audio file, convert it to video with a static image, upload to YouTube.
You can embed Codepens with a play button too, which would be cooler as a demo
I fiddle with creating sounds in JavaScript a bit, but I just went as far as creating sounds fx for a game (pretty simple ones). I want to try and work with it a little bit more in the future.

Great article, definitely inspiring.

Neat! I'd like to see something similar for a harmonica. Has it been done?
Here's someone building a harmonica using FM synthesis: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ0X_-k9cwo
That sounds like terrible cheap midi and nothing like a harmonica
hey Nick, have you tried Faust?

https://faust.grame.fr/

I have indeed! I've used Faust quite a bit over the past few years, and it was very much an inspiration for Elementary. In general I wanted a tool that meant I could think and work on my dsp in the same way that I think and work on my UI, and with the same language even.
really cool, but needs demos, or at least audio clips.