Sixteen interactive field guides · house · techno · trance · garage

Field
guides

Sixteen self-contained pages covering the production chain end to end — groove, low end, drums, synthesis, harmony, arrangement, transitions, ear training — plus a pattern bank, a sampling lab, a transformation catalogue, a Serum 2 sound-design manual, a guide to how parts relate, a melody sheet and a from-zero course for the MIDI keyboard itself. Everything plays live in the browser, most of it exports MIDI, and none of it needs an internet connection once downloaded.

PartsRelationshipsStructureSkill
16 guides
The set

Sixteen guides

Roughly in the order they were built, and roughly the order to read them if you are starting from scratch. Each one is a single HTML file — bookmark this page and route from here.

Nothing matches that search.
Routing

I have a problem

The fastest way to use this set. Find the symptom, open the page.

SymptomWhere to lookOpen
Three routes

Where to start

If you are starting a track

  • 1. Pattern Bank — pick a bass block and a sequence block that disagree, in the melting pot.
  • 2. Chords — find a progression, press Make it expensive, export the MIDI.
  • 3. Drums — load the genre pattern, export it, drag both into Live.
  • 4. Arrangement — load a template and export the arrangement skeleton as a scaffold.
  • Four downloads and you have a project with structure before you have made a sound of your own.

If you are stuck in loop hell

  • 1. Arrangement — press Tour and hear a whole seven-minute shape in ninety seconds. Usually the problem is that nothing ever leaves.
  • 2. Transformations — pick one transformation, apply it at one bar you choose in advance.
  • 3. Melody & Harmony — reharmonise the loop you already have. Same notes, new track.
  • Loop hell is almost always a decision problem rather than a creativity problem.

If you want to get better rather than finish something

  • Ten minutes a day in Keyboard, most days. Start with the note-finding drills and then play along with a progression.
  • If you own a MIDI keyboard and have never had a lesson, Keyboard before anything else. Plug it in, run the drills, and the Chords guide stops being theory.
  • Then the swing and microtiming drills, which test exactly what Groove teaches.
  • Read Melody & Harmony properly. It is the only guide about relationships rather than parts, and relationships are where the craft is.
  • Build one patch from scratch in Serum 2 or Synthesis every time you would otherwise load a preset.

Housekeeping

  • Keep all sixteen files in one folder — this page links to the others by filename, so moving or renaming one breaks its link.
  • Everything runs offline. Fonts load from the web when available and fall back to system fonts when not.
  • Use headphones or monitors, especially for Kick & Bass. Laptop speakers reproduce almost nothing below 150 Hz and two of its labs will look broken.
  • Scores and edits are held in memory only — nothing is saved and nothing is sent anywhere. Reloading starts fresh.
  • Press space to play or stop on almost every page.
At a glance

What each one does

GuideThe one thing it measuresMIDIFile

Why so many of these have a number in them. Production advice is usually asserted — "voice-lead your chords", "don't let parts collide", "swing the hats". Every guide in this set tries to measure the thing it is arguing for instead, so you can check the claim rather than take it on faith. Several of the pages contradicted my own first draft when I measured them, and the text was changed to match the data rather than the other way round.

Use them as references, not as a course. Nobody needs to read ten guides. Open the one that matches the problem in front of you, use the lab, close it. Return to Keyboard regularly to practise playing the ideas you find here.