I like to make art, write stories, and I sometimes make music. I'm most active on YouTube and Twitter.
https://twitter.com/KirbTheShyGuy
https://www.youtube.com/c/SonicKade2048
I've been using this for around a year or so now, and I think it's time I share what some people have been confused and/or curious about. Some of you may have seen songs I've made in the MFGG Discord, but allow me to give an in-depth description on what BeepBox is.
What is BeepBox?
BeepBox is an online and free chiptune-like song maker (think of it as NES of sorts), that also has a recently added mixer for custom SEGA Genesis-type sounds. It is able to play tunes you make by clicking and placing notes on bars. There's an optional piano to see the scale, scroll bar to change octave position (both are under Preferences), and many more options hidden around. You can change the tempo and key, add a reverb effect, change the rhythm of what types of beats are played, and plenty of other tools for editing songs. By placing notes, you can create covers or even remixes of songs of your favorite type. For example, I've remade the Super Mario Bros. overworld theme.
How do I use BeepBox?
[Image: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/4...eepbox.png]
-The gray and orange bars represent where you can place notes. Just click in them where the highlighted area is to place a note.
-The boxes at the bottom represent channels. At default, the first 3 rows are "pitch" channels, where you can place basic notes. The first one, blue, is the high octave. The second, yellow, is the middle octave. The third one, red, is the low octave. The octave scroll bar (mentioned above) can allow you to change octaves at will. The fourth one is a drum channel, used for, you guessed it, drums.
-You can use the Edit drop down menu to change some features of your songs, from moving notes up and down a key to copy and pasting patterns from one channel to another, but you can also use keyboard shortcuts to do these tasks easier (Will be explained later on).
-Preferences has some extra tools that can help you maneuver through the window, a couple which have been mentioned before, but others being viewing all channels/notes at the same time, along with playing the song automatically when loading it.
-All data from a BeepBox song is stored in the url itself after the hashtag (#) in it. However, the url can get quite long at times, so it's very recommend for the much longer urls that you use a shortener to decrease the amount of characters used in a message.
Here's a couple excerpts from the site itself on more song features. In the pattern editor, you can click and drag horizontally on a note to adjust its duration. You can also click above or below an existing note to enable a rapid arpeggio/trill effect, oscillating between two or more simultaneous notes. Drag vertically from an existing note to bend its pitch, or drag vertically from above or below the note to adjust its volume.
When BeepBox has focus (click on its interface above), you can use these keyboard shortcuts:
Spacebar: Pause or Resume
Z: Undo
Y or Shift Z: Redo
C: Copy the current pattern
V: Paste the current pattern
[ ]: Move the playhead* backward and forward
Arrow Keys: Change which bar is selected
1-8: Reassign a pattern to the currently selected bar
- +: Shift the notes in the pattern up or down
Are there any extra things I should know?
-The scale of a song can change what your song will sound like, indicated by a smile or a frown (a colon followed by an open or closing parenthesis). Enigma and Expert, though, aren't specific for any song type, as Expert unlocks all notes and Enigma unlocks every other note.
-You can export a song to a .wav, .midi, and .json, although .json is used for saving BeepBox songs themselves instead of links. Go to Edit -> Import JSON... to import a song with said .json file.
-You can change a song's size under Edit -> Change song size..., and by doing so you can add 3 more pitch channels and 1 drum channel, how many instruments you can use per channel, how many bars are in a song and how many beats are in a bar, and how many patterns a channel can have.
-BeepBox has an official modded version known as ModBox, which can be found here, and many more unofficial versions, one of which is SandBox and can be found here. They're more advanced and more difficult to use than normal BeepBox, so I recommend you stick to the normal one before going to the higher-leveled ones.
-A Custom Harmony effect was added a while ago that removed the arpeggio/trill effect, and instead causes a smooth harmony with two notes above and below each other. However, it only works with two notes, and not three or four (the maximum amount of notes that can be placed in one beat)
I hope you guys enjoy using BeepBox, as there is even an official BeepBox Discord server that can be found here. They're a really nice bunch of people, and they'd love to help users out with their songs if they're ever struggling.
*The playhead is the white line that indicates where the song will be played from and is being played from.
