RaveIndustrial

How the machine works

One bar of 4/4 divided into sixteen steps. Each of the four rows is a synthesised voice that fires on the steps you switch on. The voices are built in your browser out of oscillators and noise, so there are no samples, no recordings and nothing is loaded from elsewhere. The bass line is acid-style: a sawtooth wave through a resonant filter. It is not an emulation of any particular machine.

• A · KICK Sine drum. Its pitch falls from 150 Hz to 45 Hz in about a tenth of a second.
• B · HAT High-passed noise burst. Steps that fall between beats are louder.
• C · ACID Sawtooth bass through a resonant low-pass filter. Each step has its own pitch.
• D · CLAP Three fast noise bursts and a tail, through a band-pass filter.

The readouts

Everything in the panels at the top is read from the sequencer. The ring is the step clock: sixteen ticks, step 1 at the top, the lit tick is the step now playing. The barcode has one bar per active step, wider where more voices play, and the small matrix is the same pattern as a 4 by 16 grid. The gate meters jump when a voice fires and fall away after. Timing is arithmetic: a step is a sixteenth note, so 60 divided by the tempo divided by four. The loop symbol lights while the bar repeats. The warning symbol lights when DRIVE is above 60% or LEVEL is above 70%.

Controls

START / STOP

The only thing that makes sound. Nothing plays until you press it, and the page never starts audio on its own.

MUTE

Silences the output but keeps the sequencer, scope and poster running, so you can work quietly.

BPM

Tempo from 90 to 180 beats per minute. One bar is sixteen steps, four per beat.

SWING

Delays every second step by up to 30% of a step.

DRIVE

Soft-clips the mix before the compressor. Zero is clean; full is crushed.

CUTOFF

Opens and closes the acid bass filter, 200 Hz to 4 kHz.

LEVEL

Output volume. It starts at 40%.

Starter patterns

STRAIGHT

Kick on every beat, hats between them, clap on 2 and 4.

BROKEN

Syncopated kick, sixteenth hats off the beat, a busier bass line.

PRESSURE

Kick on every eighth, hats on every step, bass on most of them.

How the poster reads the pattern

The poster is built from the pattern and nothing else. Freeze it to keep a composition while you change the music, or download it as an SVG file.

Voice	Changes	Rule
Kick	Headline height	70 units plus 9 per kick step (70 to 214).
Hat	Spacing of the second line	0.8 units of letter spacing per hi-hat step.
Acid	Slant of the headline	1.2 degrees per acid step (up to 19.2°).
Clap	Outlined echoes of the second line	One echo per clap step, at most six.
Tempo	Tag on the poster	The BPM value, 90 to 180.

The pattern code is four hexadecimal digits per voice. Step 1 is the leftmost bit, so 8888 is a kick on every beat.

Made to be safe

Sound never starts by itself, MUTE is always one press away, and the page stops when you switch tabs. The poster pulses at most three times a second whatever the pattern does, nothing flashes the whole screen, and with reduced motion on the scope, gate meters and poster hold still while the current step is still marked.

Where this comes from

Late-1980s UK acid-house flyers were photocopied, airbrushed and type-led, and harder industrial techno later adopted a plainer, more austere graphic language. The heads-up-display look here borrows from that later, colder side of the culture. The building is a drawing made for this page, the layout and poster are original, and nothing here is a real event listing.

• Rave Archive UK: flyers and their creators ↗

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