I’ve played music for decades, as a guitarist first, and I’ve been increasingly interested in rythm over time.
I remember a night we have been dancing at a Mandrakesoft event, in a club. There was this guy who had his very own way of dancing, breaking the rythm, making pauses with his body. I also remember at this time the song “Independent Women”, with some breaks in the rythm. It sounded super original. It was in 2000 or 2001 I think.
Since this this moment I have always expected that music would turn into something more innovative, especially regarding rythm.
Drumboxes have gotten more and more sophisticated with impressive alterations capabilities for sound, but not that much for the rythm. As a drummer you can create something different and new, and some do, at least to a certain extent.
But in the end nothing very radical happened and listening to newly released music always makes me extremely bored: nothing happens but these either old or silly patterns. 0 creativity, 0 surprise.
So, earlier this year, I aked Claude if there was any innovation in this field….
It listed to me all the very recent innovations in drumboxes, and a few things. But nothing “looked” like what I had in mind in term of something very new that would make the rythm syncoped, broken, or even unexpected.
Guess what? I asked Claude if we could envision a drumbox that would implement a few things I had in mind.
It congratulated me about this idea, as always… Then it offered to create a prototype… To make things faster to implement and easier to test, we decided to create this prototype in HTML/CSS/JS.
And after a few iterations, I have been blown away by the result: less than 15 minutes after my first request, I had this new drum machine, running within the web-browser. I could select a core pattern, like “Rock” or “Bossa Nova”, or “Funk”, set a tempo, play and then I could make some rythm alterations live, doubling kick hits, or shifting in time the snare hits, for instance… Easy to play live like real drums, but offering new features I had never seen before. To my surprise, it could even embed some real “kits”, all this into a single HTML file you can open with Firefox for a test drive…
Soon after, I also asked it to introduce some features such as “humanizing” the groove, and then also some very special things like adding some random variations to the live play, entering into a syncoped rythm, and even a very crazy “chaos” mode.
If you want to learn more, it’s easy:
- I have a “ready to use” instance on my website at https://www.indidea.org/groovygroovabox/
- and I’ve put all source code online so you can fork it to make it more suitable to your own needs
Also, feel free to send me some suggestions, and if you like it, say it in comments and spread the word about the “GroovyGroovaBox”! 🙂
—Gaël – 13 September 2026 – Follow me: @gael@mastodon.social on Mastodon
CEO at Murena.com – Creator of /e/OS and Mandrake Linux. Open source/Free Software evangelist since 1997.