You can now make sick beats in Microsoft Excel

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...

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