Late last year, electronic musician and YouTuber Dylan Tallchief made a functional drum machine in Microsoft Excel after a bunch of Excel DAW memes made their way around social media. Now, Tallchief is back with an even more ambitious project that fully realizes the original meme’s potential: an Excel DAW he calls xlStudio. (For those outside the audio world, DAW stands for “digital audio workstation” and is a software suite like Ableton or FL Studio used for making music.)
Tallchief walks through xlStudio’s features with a cover of a-ha’s “Take On Me,” using patches that sound like they were designed by an early ‘90s Japanese sound card company. It’s surprisingly robust: there’s a transport section with playback controls, a looping function, the ability to solo and mute tracks, and global settings that assign the track’s BPM, legato, swing, and output routing.
It even exports projects as .als files so they can be opened and worked on in Ableton. There are also tons of granular controls. Each track has a submenu for changing the instrument sound, volume, and semitone for transposing things up or down.
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