Ah, lazy Sunday afternoon. It’s wet and rainy out, so what to do?
How about making some music with some fun online sequencers.
Snag a comfy chair at Starbucks and kill a few hours making music on your laptop.
Perfect!
Composer – This one is perhaps a little limited, but it’s still fun. A drum machine with synced synthesizer.
Tone Matrix – 256 buttons, and one sinewave tone, I find the simplicity of the 16 x 16 grid inspiring. I wish I could program MIDI in a DAW using something like this, that is without buying anything.
iNudge – Taking the Tone Matrix idea further, iNudge gives you 8 layers of the 16 x 16 grid, master tempo and volume control, panning and volume control for each layer.
Hobnox Audio Tool – The ultimate online musical time waster. Hobnox has a classic bass line synth, 2 classic drum machines, and a tone matrix for sound sources. There’s also several routing tools and a mixer but best of all a dozen stompbox effects you can put in any combination.
This is simply brilliant, be amazed as hours of your day magically disappear.
What I love about these is I can quickly and easily come up with something cool musically, while I find trying something similar in a DAW to be so much more work.
Once you’ve become addicted to these, the trick is getting your DAW to work like them while infinitely opening up your palette of sounds. I haven’t quite figured it out yet, but getting closer.
FL Studio used to be this inspiring, but over time it lost that fun factor for me.
Jon Tidey is a Producer / Engineer who runs his own studio, EPIC Sounds, and enjoys writing about audio on his blog AudioGeekZine.com. To comment or ask questions about this article go here.
