#oneaday Day 1137: 1BITDRAGON

I spotted a piece of music software appear on Steam last week, and was tempted to pick it up; I was a bit short on cash at the time, though, so I resisted. It's payday this week, though, so I finally nabbed it and have given it a quick spin this evening. It's fun!

The software is called 1BITDRAGON, and originated over on Itch. It's not trying to be a full-on digital audio workstation or anything — but what it is is an interesting sequencer and composition tool that provides a fun means of composing pieces of music, then experimenting with structure and effects.

1BITDRAGON is primarily piano roll based. You have several instruments to play with at the side of the screen, which can be freely assigned from a selection of both modern and chiptune-style instruments. Each instrument has its own piano roll that covers a few octaves of a pentatonic scale — i.e. notes that tend to go well with one another regardless of what combination you pick. Then all you have to do is draw your notes in, play it back and see what happens.

The nice thing about 1BITDRAGON is that you can also get it to generate simple patterns and accompaniments for you, too. For example, you can put together a solid drumbeat by customising where the main and "lighter" beats are for several different drum sounds; melodies and harmonies can be arpeggiated automatically (or jumbled up randomly) and it's dead easy to copy things around to produce variations.

There are limitations — specifically, the number of bars in a pattern, the number of patterns available and the overall number of instruments — but often working within such limitations can be a good creative spark to produce something interesting, in my experience.

Probably the most interesting thing to me is that rather than simply "bouncing" your composition to an audio file when you're done, you actually have to "record" it. That means you have the opportunity to "perform" your song as you see fit — jumping around from pattern to pattern and even bar to bar simply by clicking on them while the music continues to play. In this way, you can try out all sorts of different mixes and structures for your song before committing one to being your "final" version. There's even a "Live Mode" that allows you to apply various effects in real time, DJ-style.

1BITDRAGON is obviously designed for a very specific type of music rather than being a universally useful compositional tool — but if you're interested in ways of producing electronic music that are a little different from dropping samples in place, it's a really interesting piece of software. I'll be fiddling around with it a lot more in the near future, I'm sure.