Reader builds drum machine in an Excel spreadsheet

Thomas writes: "I'm sure most of your readers have money and technical skill to buy real samplers and v-drum kits, but I'm poor and desperately grasping for indie cred, so I've built my own sampler in Excel (of all things). It's controlled with a wireless xBox pad that I converted to USB, and I'm going to hand it out to audience members at shows to let them play the drums for me (I'm a solo bassist). In case you're interested, you can find the alpha HERE" Thomas' creation is impressive, in a distinctly lo-fi way, although it will be a whole lot cooler when he announces an all-Microsoft Office band with several Excel Synth players. Thomas is also a fan of Electroplankton, the cult Japan-only Nintendo DS music game.
VERY EXCITING UPDATE: A guy called Andrew has now developed Thomas' original into a fully-blown grid step drum sequencer. I think the sloppy timing you get from Excel is pretty fly. Link

Posted by Tom Whitwell.

Comments:

Ok, I guess I'm stupid.
But how the f### do I get this thing to work?

# posted by

Anonymous : 5:17 am

^^ Did you download the samples? A lot of people forget to do that.

Thanks for the link! A visitor to the site has already turned it into an actual drum machine/sequencer, which is pretty cool.

http://www.milezero.org/drumsequencer.xls

# posted by

Anonymous : 7:23 pm

Extract both files from the zip, copy the bass.dll to your \winnt or \windows directory, and the *.xls to some other directory.

The drum kit by default has no sounds, go here http://www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/Marina/5801/gear/ddm110.html
and download the zip of drum kit sounds, download them to the same directory as you did the .xls file.

# posted by

Anonymous : 7:25 pm