Need a Break? Try the Sloppy Online Drum Machine

Related link: http://www.zefrank.com/sequencer/

Electronic Musician’s Gino Robair warned me it would be easy to lose an hour at the Zefrank site, and he was right. One of the first distractions I discovered was this Flash-based drum machine:

The built-in sounds are intriguing and unexpected. That’s partly because they aren’t named; you select them by clicking the colored dots at the left of the window.

But what makes this online instrument unusual is that your drum hits are not quantized to 16th notes. Rather, they fall at the current playback position on the two-bar timeline. You can later drag them left and right to adjust the timing, but it never sounded exactly square, at least on the elderly computer I was using.

That slop is a cool thing, though. I started thinking of the instrument as an “analog” digital drum machine. You can even save your patterns for other visitors to try out. I assume the one called “Grobair” is Gino’s. I left one called FlashBat.

Unlike GrooveLab, the Zefrank drum machine can’t export your patterns as audio files (you’ll need a streamripper for that), but it does let you hear your changes right away. GrooveLab has to render everything first.

If you’re like me, though, you’ll blow the time you save exploring the rest of this entertaining site.

What’s your favorite online musical instrument?