Retabulate the framistator! Sum E4-dash-23! Cowbell the TPS reports!

December 21, 2005 4:33 PM

New invention: A computer-based drum machine. In Microsoft Excel.
posted by loquacious (31 comments total)

As a drummer, I find this wholly unusable...

And wholly awesome.
posted by Evstar at 4:41 PM on December 21, 2005

holy shit!

useless but awsome..just the way I like it
posted by zerokey at 4:49 PM on December 21, 2005

See also: Pac-Man for Microsoft Excel
posted by Mwongozi at 4:59 PM on December 21, 2005

"Impress me! Nothing says 'I trust Thomas as a random stranger on the Internet' like opening your computer to a possible macro virus."

For some reason, this actually makes me feel more comfortable with opening a random Excel file.
posted by spiderskull at 5:00 PM on December 21, 2005

Obviously doesn't work in Mac, RIGHT?!
posted by ParisParamus at 5:21 PM on December 21, 2005

Yes. It fails utterly on Excel for Macintosh. Please also note that it includes some DLL of unknown province and purpose -- this ain't just an Excel file, folks.
posted by majick at 5:36 PM on December 21, 2005

It's the drumming virus!
posted by ParisParamus at 5:43 PM on December 21, 2005

Opens in Excel 2003, but no sound using keyboard. Air drums maybe?
posted by hockeyman at 5:52 PM on December 21, 2005

Please also note that it includes some DLL of unknown province and purpose -- this ain't just an Excel file, folks.

Gee, could it be this?
"Included in this archive is the bass.dll, which performs sound decoding and mixing for DrumPad."
posted by spock at 5:52 PM on December 21, 2005

Reads instructions again, downloads sounds. Hears sound. Fun begins.
posted by hockeyman at 5:59 PM on December 21, 2005

Opens in Excel 2003, but no sound using keyboard. Air drums maybe?

You have to grab some samples too.
posted by pompomtom at 6:18 PM on December 21, 2005

Didn't Freddie Mercury pretty much dare a virus once?
posted by swell at 6:38 PM on December 21, 2005

That's nothing. This guy did a real-time Fourier synthesizer in Excel. Playing WAVs you downloaded by pressing the keys is one thing. Actually generating the sound from scratch? Of course, the drum set has a neat little picture of a drumset going for it, and this just has scroll bars... but, download it and judge for yourself.
posted by cacophony at 6:42 PM on December 21, 2005

That synthesizer is insane. So how come we haven't seen The Microsoft Excels yet?
posted by panoptican at 6:53 PM on December 21, 2005

If you think this is cool, try out my old man's Excel ray-tracing package to optimize configuration and dimensions of light guide connecting 1"x3" scintillator to 1" phototube
posted by H. Roark at 7:18 PM on December 21, 2005

Any spreadsheet capable of ray-tracing has long since given in to feature creep. I don't WANT full word processing in Photoshop, people! This is why OpenDoc failed!

seriously, though, wow.
posted by verb at 7:33 PM on December 21, 2005

Ok, I've got the dll file and the downloaded samples in my WINNT directory and still no sound. Any ideas?
posted by es_de_bah at 7:49 PM on December 21, 2005

downloaded samples go in same directory as .xls file...
posted by H. Roark at 7:57 PM on December 21, 2005

*smacks forhead* Thanks, H. Roark.
posted by es_de_bah at 8:06 PM on December 21, 2005

See also: Pac-Man for Microsoft Excel...

Nobuya.Chikada(Japanese Excel Crazy Guy)

heh.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 8:13 PM on December 21, 2005

Damn. Thanks for those followup links, folks. That's just insane.

Now I just need one of those obvious reminders about how people's watches today are, like, 10 million times more powerful than my first computer and my head will explode.

*checks the time on new color screen cell phone, head explodes*
posted by loquacious at 8:22 PM on December 21, 2005

head explodes

i graped your fife, btw
posted by cortex at 11:35 PM on December 21, 2005

Seems like one could turn this into a sequencer really easily...
posted by anomie at 6:26 AM on December 22, 2005

This all follows from Turing's Computable Numbers paper, folks. Everything in cyberspace is just a big fucking integer. Some are easy to find, others are harder, but some things in the World Wide World can never be coded as an integer.

Some awesomely nice numbers these folks have got, I must say.
posted by warbaby at 7:18 AM on December 22, 2005

The first is a closed hat every eighth note ("1-and-2-and-3-and-4-and"). The second is a bass drum on every quarter note (or on every other hat beat, "1-and-2-and-3-and-4-and"). Finally, you want to add a snare accent on every other quarter note, which shuffles really well on the 2 and the 4 ("1-and-2-and-3-and-4-and").

Dude! Don't be giving away all the drum programmers' secrets! What are you, Penn Jillette now?
posted by soyjoy at 7:35 AM on December 22, 2005

This spreadsheet has a good rythmn. We can dance to it. The numbers add up to... fun!

-Sarbanes-Oxley Audit
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 9:27 AM on December 22, 2005

What's that from, IRFH? Islands in the Net?
posted by loquacious at 10:34 AM on December 22, 2005

Just my lame sense of humor.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 10:38 AM on December 22, 2005

Sarbanes-Oxley is never lame.
posted by panoptican at 10:46 AM on December 22, 2005

I'm the operator of my pocket calculator.
posted by starscream at 12:19 PM on December 22, 2005

Fucking great. Thank you!
posted by xod at 1:41 PM on December 22, 2005