My First Flash Project – a Virtual Drum Machine and Sreaming Music Player

on Oct 21 in Music Production, Personal, Web Design, Web Development by Andy Chimicles

One day last year I decided it would be a good idea to make a customized music player for my music productions. I didn’t want to use any of those standard players, I didn’t want to have to code html, I just wanted to design a cool interface.

So, I decided Flash would be the best avenue – despite the fact that I didn’t know flash at all. I had seen my roommate design in Flash and I though it would be no problem. My idea was to make an MPC drum machine that will allow you to play the drum machine using your computer keyboard. Also, if you click on each pad with your mouse it will play one of my songs. Seemed like an easy idea at the time, but as a total beginner it was a long development process. This turned out to be a great project to get a good understanding of Flash and have a good time doing it.

Here’s a (very) quick rundown of how I developed it:

Read a bunch of tutorials on Flash design. Started out with a stock picture of an Akai MPC2000 and Photoshopped my logo over theirs. Imported the image to Flash.

Added buttons to each drum pad on the pic. Wrote actionscript that triggers a different drum pad sound on a mouse hover. Assigned each of the drumpads to a keyboard key. Wrote actionscript to trigger a different song for each pad on mouse click. Actionscript for play, stop, volume, MPC displaying the song titles, etc.

And there you have it, no you can build your very own custom flash drum machine/streaming music player! JK, it wasn’t that easy, and I don’t have the time to write about all the development steps here. If anyone is actually interested in learning the ins and outs of this please feel free to drop me a line and I’d be glad to help.

Now have fun with a version of the drum machine below, or play the full sized version at my DJ Chima site homepage. It’s easy to use, just hover over “instructions” to see how. And as with any flash module, you have to click anywhere on the picture in order for it to let you use your keyboard keys to play the drum pads.

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Author: Andy Chimicles

Internet marketer, website developer, musician, producer, photographer, lover

This author's website address is http://www.andychimicles.com

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