I'm about to share a bunch of songs I've made with my favorite free online tool for making (especially chip-tune) music. I've been using beepbox.co for 6+ years now, and the feature set has only grown in that time. It abstracts away any requirements of music theory knowledge to be able to make music, and I love that about it.

I also love that in sharing music created from it, you can get a unique link that encodes all the music you made and settings you changed so that other people can play around with the same song you were. ¹

Here's a link to the settings I generally start with whenever I want to make a new beepbox.co song

By default, you start with three audio channels (instruments that play notes). I've made them all the simplest sine-waves possible. There's tons of preset instruments. I like the tenor saxophone that's included for how it makes chords nicely. Notes go in the big grid in the top half. As you click, you'll hear more stuff. Once you have something you like, you can move down to the part with a bunch of 1s at the bottom. This is your looper and lets you control what patterns you want to repeat and when and how. It's also how you specify one instrument from another (like blue from yellow from red). At the bottom of the looper is the drum instrument channel. You can have multiples of any of the channels, but the default is 3 musical and one drum.

Truly the entire interface and experience of using this tool is just being curious and exploring and seeing how it changes what sound comes out. There's some means of repeating, controlling tempo, and other stuff, but you can find it as you play around. I'm still discovering stuff years later, honestly. You can specify effects for instruments to customize how they sound, you can do pitch bending or dynamics or harmonies or glissandos by clicking and dragging various parts of the notes in the top half.

Basically the limit to all of this is what can reasonably fit within a single url, as far as I can tell. Once you've finished a song, you can either just share the link and the other person you're sharing it to can open up beepbox and press play, or you can export it as a wav file, which is now supported for upload on here.

Here's an incredibly intricate version of Megalovania from Undertale done in beepbox as a way to showcase a frankly ridiculous amount of the features contained within. What they did in this is far beyond what I've ever achieved with any of the very short clips I've made over the years. This Megalovania cover was created by quantummultiverse on soundcloud

1. You may recall this being a thing I liked about ObservableHQ as well, if you've seen some other posts of mine recently.