A very simple drum machine for the Novation Launchpad, written in the ChucK programming language. This project is to serve as a tutorial for users not familiar with the semantics of ChucK.

make sure you have ChucK and the Novation Launchpad drivers installed:

• ChucK install page
• Launchpad Driver download page

Clone or download this repository to somewhere convenient on your machine. To run the application, open up a terminal, navigate to the directory that contains the repository, and execute the command chuck run. This will launch ChucK with the run.ck file, which will import the other source code files in the project.

The file dmachine.ck contains the annotated source code of the drum machine logic. This is the main point of interest for developers looking to learn a bit about ChucK.

The directory lp contains a set of chuck files that implement a handler for the novation launchpad. This greatly simplifies the project, since interacting with the launchpad itself is largely taken care of. Developers are encouraged to read this file to see how chuck handles MIDI communication in the raw, but it's also possible to simply ignore the implementation details and just pay attention to the methods that are defined.

The file run.ck is the main entry point for our chuck application. Chuck doesn't have a main() method. Files are included with machine.Add, but you can't add a file and then use it in the same source code file, which is extremely annoying. That is, if you have two files A and B, such that B depends on something defined in A, you need a third file, C, that includes both of them; B can't include A and then use the definitions contained in A on its own. This is something of a wart in chuck but it's not that big of a deal.

The samples directory contains some drum sounds, since a drum machine without any drum sounds is pretty useless. This is a selection of 808 samples found here.