Guitar Lab

[Inventor]

Hi, I just found this corner of the forum. I've been hanging out in the ChucK forum, learning ChucK and writing music programs. Recently GUI widgets were released in the Mac version (and PC, Linux to follow) that enabled me to create Guitar Lab. I know, I know, it belongs in the ChucK forum but I just though some folks reading here might like to hear about it as well.

The basis of Guitar Lab is the logic matrix in the main window that allows you to do what I call Boolean sequencing. This is an age-old technique that I sort of rediscovered and expanded, in my music newbiness, and it makes good sounding songs with minimal effort.

Each row in the matrix is a logic term in which you click on boxes (1 for each binary digit in a binary count) to enter 1, 0, don't care, or random in the bits. These bits are then ANDed together. If any one of the 8 shown logic terms evaluates to a true value, then a note is played.

Each logic term has a midi note offset that you specify to change the notes being played, and if more than one term lights up, the notes are summed to form a higher note. Additionally, each bit in the binary count has a midi note offset as well.

Right now Guitar Lab has 10 instruments including 3 guitars, some drums, saxophone, flute, and microphone. It also has a scale selector, a WahWah, and Reverb on the output. Plus the various instruments have a bunch of sliders to adjust their model parameters.

It opens up in five windows: the logic matrix, string, percussion, wind, and scales windows. Each window is 800x600 resolution so you generally have to cascade them.

If you would like to read up on Guitar Lab or hear some of the songs I have made with it, just go here:

http://www.freedomodds.com/music/guitar_lab.html

I'd like to get some more feedback on Guitar Lab, so far it is three weeks old and there have been about 100 hits on the above page but as usual not much of a response from the visitors. So if you're interested, please feel free to check it out and maybe even try it (if you have a Mac). Comments, questions, suggestions are welcome. Enjoy!