BassMate

BassMate

This is a simple drum machine and sequencer.

I want to be able to quickly create simple rhythm sequences to help me pratice electric bass, and was looking for something between a basic metronome and a full-fledged DAW. The Drumbit online app (https://drumbit.app/) is pretty good, but having to point and click while playing an instrument is not tactile enough for me. Accordingly, BassedMate (https://github.com/ukmaker/BassedMate) was born. This was the first iteration of the project, using a Teensy.

BassMate (this repo) is an evolution. I wanted to eliminate the VS1053 chip and I found the Electrosmith Daisy Seed (https://www.electro-smith.com/daisy/daisy) which looked like it could do all the synthesis itself. I also found the MusicBoard project (https://github.com/julbouln/musicboard) which inspired me to try to port to the Seed. This proved to be tricky, so I gave up (I'll try again one day!) and took a different path.

The UI of BassedMate felt a bit off, and when I came across the NavKey (https://coolcomponents.co.uk/products/i2c-navkey-7-function-joypad-black) I thought I'd try something different. I also had an STM32F411 BlackPill (https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/stm32f411-blackpill-development-board?variant=39274213343315) which has tons of memory and is really cheap.

So I remixed everything, sprinkled a new flavour of my GUI library (https://os.mbed.com/users/duncanFrance/code/SimpleGUI/) on the top and am happy with the result.

(https://youtu.be/watch?v=EM4BZbcfi_k)

Installation

This is a PlatformIO project.

Clone this repository somewhere, then get the git submodules:

  git clone git@github.com:ukmaker/BassMate.git
  cd BassMate
  git submodule init
  git submodule update

Open the folder in PlatformIO, build and deploy as usual.

I have an ST-LINK V2 clone which I use to program Blue- and Black-pills. I throroughly recommend it since with it you get to debug with single-step etc.