Pocket Band: Raspberry Pi Pico 2 Groovebox @Raspberry_Pi #PiDay #RaspberryPi
The term “garage band” held the promise of making world-shaking music with meagre resources. Big sound can come from small groups and simple tools. Remember the first time you realized that the titanic sound of Black Sabbath is coming from three musicians and a guy on a microphone? Or if that’s not shocking enough, how about the sound that comes from just two folks in The White Stripes?
But a garage band is a bit of an outmoded concept. With the birth of synthesizers and sequencers, everything you need to make musical tracks got smaller and smaller until you could fit a band in your pocket. Companies like Teenage Engineering have made affordable sequencers the size of a deck of cards.
If you happen to have a Raspberry Pi Pico, you might want to explore this sample player and groovebox project from rheslip20. Using a Pico, this little tool has enough for you to start cutting tracks. Here’s more:
Pico 2 Groovebox is a flexible sample player + groovebox with 16 tracks and 16 scenes. Samples can be oneshots or loops. You can play samples with the keypad, play loops, record clips and use drum trigger patterns. Each track has a sequencer which triggers a sample to play. Sequences can be from 1 to 128 steps but normally you would set tracks up as multiples of 16 steps (1 bar).
It is helpful to think of tracks and scenes as a matrix with columns as tracks and rows as scenes. This setup is similar to Ableton and most grooveboxes. You can record a clip in every cell of this 16×16 matrix ie up to 144 clips, subject to memory limitation which is currently 512 total notes per track.
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