Brick, snare, brick, snare

July 4, 2012 4:34 AM

Beat Bricks - Lego Step Sequencer

Step sequencers, like the 808, are an iconic part of music production - the 808 is in "Planet Rock" or "Fight For Your Right To Party". If' you've listened to music from the 1980s onward, you've almost certainly heard a step sequencer being used.

Basically, the rhythm moves from left to right through a series of steps. Pressing a button turns the step on or off.

Now you can create a step sequencer out of LEGO (and a webcam, Python, OpenCV, OSC, MIDI, and Ableton Live)

-made at Advance Hackathon 2012, Koln

posted by dubold (8 comments total)

The 808 is a drum machine that, like lots of samplers and synthesizers, contains a step sequencer to trigger the sound. You can also get stand-alone step sequencers that you can use with any synth -- some using midi, older ones use cv.

/pedant
posted by PeterMcDermott at 4:58 AM on July 4, 2012

sorry, I was trying to write a really simple explanation and perhaps inadvertently obscured my point there. An 808 is a drum machine/step sequencer. And technically you're not hearing the step sequencer, but whatever it's sequencing.
posted by dubold at 5:45 AM on July 4, 2012 [1 favorite]

In slightly related news, Danish amusement park "Legoland" today had its visitor no. 50,000,000. (It opened in 1968.)
posted by WalkingAround at 5:48 AM on July 4, 2012

I thought it was officially called LegoBricksOrToysNotLegosLand?
posted by laconic skeuomorph at 6:17 AM on July 4, 2012 [1 favorite]

rad
posted by beerbajay at 6:17 AM on July 4, 2012

cool!

I was really hoping that pattern switching would be just dropping in a whole new baseplate with a pattern on it already.
posted by jonbro at 7:36 AM on July 4, 2012

Cool video, but now I'm really disappointed that this isn't a real thing. :(
posted by xedrik at 11:27 PM on July 4, 2012

It is a real thing, and he has the link to the source code there. Unless there is some other definition of real thing that I don't know about.
posted by jonbro at 1:58 AM on July 5, 2012