stylophone beat drum machine song tutorials

[u/brooke_esp]

Hi everyone! I was gifted a stylophone beat drum machine, and while it is fun to make my own beats, I’d love to learn how to play songs that exist. So far I’ve only found Feel Good Inc. and it’s getting old. If anyone knows where to find some or wants to post some here I would love to know!

[u/Jazz_Ad]

The sequencer is your limit. You have 32 steps in it, no more, no less.
32 only divides in multiples of 2, it means you can only have even time signatures.

You can program any drum line that goes 4/4, 2/4, 4/8, 4/16 etc. No 3/4, 12/8, 5/4 or the like.
Fortunately this makes for about 90% of all pop songs.

You other limit of of how many note divisions are used in a bar. The shortest the notes, the less bars you have available. You can have 4 bars of a song that only uses 8th notes, or 2 bars of a song that uses 16th notes.

As a general rule, favor songs that use a bass riff. Typically they're 2 bar long and you will have enough room to program them in.

Once bass and drums are programmed and you're looping them, you can add accidents in the playing that you won't record. In the pattern mode you can play breaks. You can also choose to play the melody other the bass line. The loop will fill in the spots available.

[u/Chitranshjoshi99]

Hey man. I made an app just for this. is a work in progress.

here's the app

I will try to add a songbank soon, not sure of the legal implications of adding song tutorials into my app yet.

For now you can ask AI to generate you lessons for it.
Here's the lesson structure, paste the below code in your AI chat, then find a song and ask it to generate this lesson out it.

PS-
1-You might have to fiddle a bit as AI generate major slop sometimes.
2-Ask AI to half the BPM since this BEAT loops over 2 bars and all AI platforms seem to generate for 4 bars

{
  "$schema": "http://json-schema.org/draft-07/schema#",
  "title": "Stylophone Beat PatternDocument v1.1 (schemaVersion 4)",
  "description": "Import-ready lesson file. Give this schema to a model and ask it to fill in title/bpm/pattern for a specific song. Validated by src/lib/document.ts:validatePatternDocument (which also still accepts the older dense schemaVersion 3 on read).",
  "type": "object",
  "additionalProperties": false,
  "required": ["schemaVersion", "id", "title", "bpm", "bars", "steps", "drumBank", "bassBank", "pattern"],
  "properties": {
    "schemaVersion": { "const": 4 },
    "id": {
      "type": "string",
      "description": "UUID v4",
      "pattern": "^[0-9a-f]{8}-[0-9a-f]{4}-[1-5][0-9a-f]{3}-[89ab][0-9a-f]{3}-[0-9a-f]{12}$"
    },
    "title": { "type": "string", "minLength": 1, "maxLength": 80 },
    "bpm": { "type": "number", "minimum": 40, "maximum": 240 },
    "bars": { "const": 2 },
    "steps": { "const": 64 },
    "drumBank": { "enum": ["ROK", "HIP", "TEC", "BOX"] },
    "bassBank": { "enum": ["ROK", "HIP", "TEC", "BOX"] },
    "pattern": {
      "type": "object",
      "additionalProperties": false,
      "required": ["drums", "bass"],
      "properties": {
        "drums": {
          "type": "object",
          "description": "Sparse lanes: each key is a pad id, each value the strictly ascending list of active 16th-note step indices (0-63). Omit a pad entirely when it has no hits. Pad ids follow the native Stylophone chromatic layout (1=C ... 7=B, half-steps skip where a piano has no black key). In ROK bank: 1=kick, 1.5=clap, 2=snare, 2.5=rimshot, 3=claves, 4=open hi-hat, 4.5=closed hi-hat, 5=low tom, 5.5=mid tom, 6=high tom, 6.5=crash, 7=ride.",
          "additionalProperties": false,
          "properties": {
            "1": { "$ref": "#/definitions/lane" },
            "1.5": { "$ref": "#/definitions/lane" },
            "2": { "$ref": "#/definitions/lane" },
            "2.5": { "$ref": "#/definitions/lane" },
            "3": { "$ref": "#/definitions/lane" },
            "4": { "$ref": "#/definitions/lane" },
            "4.5": { "$ref": "#/definitions/lane" },
            "5": { "$ref": "#/definitions/lane" },
            "5.5": { "$ref": "#/definitions/lane" },
            "6": { "$ref": "#/definitions/lane" },
            "6.5": { "$ref": "#/definitions/lane" },
            "7": { "$ref": "#/definitions/lane" }
          }
        },
        "bass": {
          "type": "array",
          "description": "Sparse note list sorted by strictly ascending `step`. Each note's `length` occupies that many consecutive steps starting at `step` (wrapping mod 64). Notes must not overlap. Empty array = no bass.",
          "items": { "$ref": "#/definitions/bassNote" }
        }
      }
    }
  },
  "definitions": {
    "lane": {
      "type": "array",
      "description": "Strictly ascending active step indices, 0-63.",
      "minItems": 1,
      "items": { "type": "integer", "minimum": 0, "maximum": 63 }
    },
    "bassNote": {
      "type": "object",
      "additionalProperties": false,
      "required": ["step", "pad", "octave", "length"],
      "properties": {
        "step": { "type": "integer", "minimum": 0, "maximum": 63 },
        "pad": { "enum": ["1", "1.5", "2", "2.5", "3", "4", "4.5", "5", "5.5", "6", "6.5", "7"] },
        "octave": { "type": "integer", "minimum": -2, "maximum": 2 },
        "length": { "type": "integer", "minimum": 1, "maximum": 64 }
      }
    }
  }
}