beats

A command-line drum machine, written in Ruby

git clone https://git.hawx.me/beats.git

BEATS Drum Machine

BEATS is a command-line drum machine written in pure Ruby. Feed it a song notated in YAML, and it will produce a precision-milled *.wav file of impeccable timing and feel. Here's an example song:

Song: Tempo: 120 Structure: - Verse: x2 - Chorus: x4 - Verse: x2 - Chorus: x4 Kit: - bass: sounds/bass.wav - snare: sounds/snare.wav - hh_closed: sounds/hh_closed.wav - agogo: sounds/agogo_high.wav Verse: - bass: X...X...X...X... - snare: ..............X. - hh_closed: X.XXX.XXX.X.X.X. - agogo: ..............XX Chorus: - bass: X...X...X...X... - snare: ....X.......X... - hh_closed: X.XXX.XXX.XX..X. - sounds/tom4.wav: ...........X.... - sounds/tom2.wav: ..............X.

And here's what it sounds like after getting the BEATS treatment. What a glorious groove!

Changes I've Made From the Main Repo

Added probability-ness, so you can define the probability of a drum playing as opposed to just saying when it will or won't. This is done by a different syntax (though the old can be mixed with this in the same file):

Song: Tempo: 120 Flow: - Verse: x2 - Chorus: x4 - Verse: x2 - Chorus: x4 Kit: - bass: sounds/bass.wav - snare: sounds/snare.wav - hh_closed: sounds/hh_closed.wav - agogo: sounds/agogo_high.wav Verse: - bass: .5 0 0 0 .5 0 0 0 .5 0 0 0 .5 0 0 0 - snare: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 .9 0 - hh_closed: 1 0 .3 .2 1 0 0 1 1 .5 .5 .5 .5 .5 .5 .5 - agogo: .1 0 .1 .1 .1 .1 0 .1 0 0 0 0 0 0 .5 .8 Chorus: - bass: .6 .3 .1 0 .9 .3 .4 0 .8 .8 0 .1 1 .2 .2 .3 - snare: 0 0 .5 .8 .3 0 0 .1 .2 .1 .7 0 1 0 0 0 - hh_closed: 1 .2 .9 .9 .9 .2 1 .6 1 0 .7 .8 .2 .2 1 .3 - sounds/tom4.wav: 0 0 0 0 0 .5 0 0 0 0 .5 .9 0 0 0 0 - sounds/tom2.wav: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 .4 0 .4 0 0 0 0 1 0

Limitations

The patterns aren't worked out each time yet, so if you repeat a "random" pattern 4 times as above it will be the same "random" pattern. There is no way around this yet until I change the structure of beats a little to make it work.

Current Status

The latest stable version of BEATS is 1.2.1, released on March 6, 2011. This is a minor release which includes the following improvements:

You can use the | character to represent bar lines in a track rhythm. This is optional, but often makes longer rhythms easier to read.

The "Structure" section of the song header is now called "Flow". (You can still use "Structure" for now, but you'll get a warning).

A pattern can contain multiple tracks that use the same sound. Previously, BEATS would pick one of those tracks as the 'winner', and the other tracks wouldn't be played.

Bug fix: A better error message is displayed if a sound file is in an unsupported format (such as MP3), or is not even a sound file.

Installation

To install the latest stable version (1.2.1) from rubygems.org, run the following from the command line:

sudo gem install beats

You can then run BEATS from the command-line using the beats command.

BEATS is not very useful unless you have some sounds to use with it. You can download some example sounds from http://beatsdrummachine.com.