Suddenly, a bunch of the producers I follow are buzzing about the music-mangling possibilities of Septabee, a free DAW for Linux and Windows developed “in secret” over “20,000 hours.” And it looks like insane fun: a bonkers dataflow interface and “violently unfinished” early-access software available through an intentionally broken website that autoplays music and makes you hunt for the click zone like it’s 1994.
Updated: I’ve added clarification about what I was and was not attempting to claim about this software! Folks, it is free and labeled as violently unfinished!
Claude and other tools are giving us a glut of spontaneously produced, standalone, and browser-based modular tools. There’s such a glut of software that just opening my inbox now gives me an instant headache.
Septabee’s origins are somewhat mysterious, but then part of the fun of this particular piece of software is its deliciously dodgy appearance. This is for people who want to eat food they can’t read out of the back of a convenience store two weeks after its pull date.
Now that that’s (hopefully) clearer, let’s proceed.
Tracing Septabee through its early sketches in the Discord museum, it seems this all started as “Woven Music Studio,” hacked together in Code::Blocks and SMFL (It’s now “Text Editor and Vulkan”-based.) It began when the creator had “absolutely no idea what I was doing.” From there, it emerged through lots of visual prototypes, it seems, and these jiggly shapes emerged.
One moment in the development process Lost Robot describes thusly:
at this point i was so experienced at writing entire DAWs from scratch over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again that i got here in just two months of work
Somehow, eventually, Lost Robot wound up with Septabee, the software now in early access, described as written not in C++, but… B++. What should we make of this? I frankly don’t know.
Weird as I’m making this sound, it’s actually reasonably easy to follow along with the tutorial. Bonus points for anything introduced with “this will sound terrible, but let’s try it.”
From there, you see some stuff you’ve seen before — node-based UI, check, patch up your music free-flowing like it’s a modular, okay, and there’s our sine wave.
Then… pomegranates start appearing. No, like really. This is a pomegranate-based modular. The keyboard shortcut is “P.” But it is also “Z.” Z and P are equivalent, or my name isn’t Zeter Kirn.
And it isn’t only patchable: you can freely add advanced operators to the patch cables.
Patterns, set to any tuning you like, can be patched in freely.
All of this you find by navigating like you’re in the overhead map in Mass Effect. Welcome to Black MIDI: The Next Generation.
Everything is modulating everything, all sample-accurate (for phase modulation of things you never modulated before). Eventually you’ll make your own plug-ins. You create instruments and (soon) UIs.
In short, features, as far as I can tell:
And more:
See, if this were the 1990s, six people would know about this tool. Five of them would wind up teaching in academia (no shame in that), and the sixth would wind up being Richard D. James or Thom Yorke or whatever, thanks to being British and so on. But no, it’s 2026. You’re here with me. We can all go stark raving mad learning Septabee together. Maybe we’ll all create our own genre, even if we just meet in dive bars with portable PAs and play for one another.
Where do you get this? From this absolutely horrible website (like the worst you’ve seen in years — mad respect!):
[warning — it plays sound — really like we’re back in the 90s]
https://septabee.nekoweb.org
From there, you’ll find other resources, including a Discord community.
Some folks are already making stuff with this. Also from a terrible website (in the burning-your-eyes way, not in the owned-by-a-techbro way, so like the good kind of terrible):
First Steps of a Little Bee – Made in Septabee!!! [newgrounds]
This is typical of the #septabuzz spreading across Blue Sky at the moment:
fl studios out im inthe people want more septabee
I, for one, welcome our new seven-sided overlords. People are already having fun with this one, so I’m curious to see what you create.
Now, mind, this is free-as-in-beer, not open source. We have no idea what’s going on in that code. But like I said, this one is for people who want to live on the edge. Buy that container. Don’t worry that you can’t read the label. Put the whole tube in your mouth at once. What can go wrong?
Yummers.
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