A drum sequencer for forró rhythms — built for musicians, students, and anyone curious about the music of northeastern Brazil.
I'm Yerko Escalona, originally from Chile, currently based in Vienna, Austria. I got into forró through dancing about four years ago and quickly fell in love with the music. That love led me to pick up the zabumba, and today I play it in Beira Mar (@beira.mar.forro), a forró band here in Vienna.
I built this sequencer because I wanted a tool to study and visualize the percussion patterns that drive forró — something I could use to practice, teach, and share rhythms with other musicians and dancers. As a software developer, building it myself felt like the natural thing to do.
You can find me on Instagram at @yerkoescalona.
Forró is a family of music genres and partner dances from the northeast of Brazil.
At its core, forró is powered by a trio of percussion instruments: the zabumba, the pandeiro, and the triângulo.
The genre was popularized by Luiz Gonzaga (1912–1989), the "King of Baião."
A large double-headed bass drum played with a mallet (maceta) on one side and a thin stick (bacalhau) on the other.
A frame drum with jingles, similar to a tambourine but played with sophisticated technique.
The triangle in forró is not the simple timekeeper of orchestral music — it plays a driving, syncopated pattern.
The Forró Sequencer lets you build, hear, and tweak traditional forró percussion patterns step by step. It is designed for:
All sounds are synthesized in real-time using the Web Audio API — no samples to load, no downloads. The sequencer works entirely in your browser.
This project is open source under the GPL-3.0 license. Contributions and feedback are welcome.
Source code: github.com/yescalona/forro-sequencer