A few days ago I discovered an amazing music program hosted on the game site Kongregate. Apparently the creator, the guy who runs QuickFingers.net is in some sort of contest for a LOT of money to see who can make the coolest music game on that site. Well, his was on top when I checked a few days ago, and I tried it out. It was AWESOME!! The game he created is called Step Seq (try it at https://www.kongregate.com/games/quickfingerz/step-seq).

Really, this is just like any hardware-based step sequencer, which is apparently some sort of grid of buttons that you can press and it will modulate a midi device and play back notes. Each row on the grid is a single note, while each column is some sort of time index. The sequencer part is based on a concept that the grid will play itself over and over and you can change the settings each time.

Well, this game-based one here is absolutely incredible. When I first looked at it, it was barely viewed and still in the testing stages, meaning that the rating numbers were not high. This was ONLY because it was fairly new. I played with it and immediately rated it 5 stars and favorited it. When I came back the next day, it had 10,000+ views already. Obviously this thing is a huge hit.

Well, yesterday I recorded a video of my 11th song using version 0.3.

You can view it here:

It was done as sort of a tutorial, so it’s a bit long.

When I came back just like 20 minutes ago, I decided I wanted to record another video. Mostly my songs are fairly random. I start out with a single note and see where it goes from there. So far, they’ve ALL been different. Well, I clicked through the mandatory get started screens when loading and then started playing, when I noticed the Pad panel was missing!

I looked around and saw that instead of the percussion being a selection of a few different pre-programmed sequences, it suddenly had its own entire submenu! That’s when I realised that sometime during the night or today, he updated it to version 0.4! I explored around (which you will see in the following video), and found that not only had he given users the ability to create their own percussion as well as the previously-available instrument 1 and 2, but there was an entirely new menu of Advanced options. This gives the user the ability to change keys, change the actual instrument definitions of Instr 1 and Instr 2, and even edit the reverb and echo settings! TOTALLY a surprise!

The only thing I hope for now is that once he reaches version 1.0 or something, he makes an installable offline program. Loading it from a website is very taxing on my computer, and I usually have to turn off everything in order to play with it, but if it were a standalone program, I think most of those problems could be alleviated.

In any case, I’m totally loving this thing. Not only is it letting my creativity out, but the features he’s adding are making the thing so much better many times over.

One thing my mom suggested is that I make ringtones from it. I think I’ll do that soon!

Here’s the sample of version 0.4: