ProtoTune

ProtoTune (still working on that name) is a software to help me compose music. Well I'm making it for me but everyone is welcome to try it out. Here's Sonic 1 bonus stage music:

https://youtu.be/eyyy4n1sTiw

DISCLAIMER: This is embarrassingly crude at the moment. This is prototype version 0.0000yisthisevenonline0001. You can play around in the interface to create instruments (each instrument is a collection of synthesizers) and put some notes on the very limited timeline editor. It might crash.

The basic idea is this: you have a very basic synthesizer, just enough flexibility to create distinguishable instruments. You have a very basic sequencer too. It's all very basic; this is not a music production software. The software works by applying what I call 'layers' over the main track, that operate on the notes in some specific way. These layers are made by the user himself in a yet-to-be-implemented interface.

For example. You can make a layer that snaps the notes to a scale. That's simple enough. You could make a layer that creates chord progressions. A layer that extends the number of notes to create microtonal music. Layers stack on each other and work on the output of the previous layer. You can keep on stacking and editing previous layers or you can eventually collapse everything back into one if you want to commit and work from there.

I always wanted a workflow that allowed me to quickly test ideas that are inconvenient or time consuming to test on an instrument. Like, what if I want to make a chord progression disregarding scale, but increasing the brightness of each chord? Or maybe I want to test some rule I made up to see how that works. There are very few software focusing on prototyping music, and I don't like them very much. They make too many assumptions about what I want to make, and are also very expensive. So I decided to try making one myself. Not being a real programmer or a sound engineer, this project is off to a promising start.

Current state: You can make instruments. Each instrument is a collection of as many synthesizers as you want. Synthesizers have a limited number of (exposed) parameters, like falloff, cutoff frequency etc. The sequencer is functional. You can add notes for each instrument, change the size of the note with the mouse scroll wheel, and delete notes with left click. Navigation is done with middle mouse button. You can't save anything yet. And the whole interface is riddled with debug information that is useless to everyone but me.

I'll let this project rest for a while before starting to work on the layer system.