Build Your Own Beautiful, Beautiful Metal Breakdowns With The 'Djenerator'

The human mind is a beautiful thing. Specifically, Ross McMillan's human mind is a beautiful thing, having conceived and created this… this… wonder of the modern age, this marvel of technology: the Djenerator.

It takes its name from the prog-metal spin-off genre djent, which you can be a huge nerd and read all about, but the crux of the sentence is that McMillan, a web developer from Glasgow with either too much time or brilliance on his hands, has created an easy-to-use but ultimately insane metal breakdown generator, allowing the user to lose hours just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks

Users can pick a particular style of breakdown — most named after bands, like Meshuggah, Tesseract and Sworn In, while there's also a couple under the subheading 'thall', which is a whole thing of its own — but the customisability goes way further than that; you're able to set the BPM (either by entering a specific tempo or tapping a button), number of bars, beats to a bar, and general odds of the program concocting a semibreve, minim, crotchet, quaver or semiquaver (full, half, quarter, eighth and sixteenth note, respectively), and whether or not you'd like those grouped as triplets.

You can also pick which frets to include on which strings, whether you'd like dissonance and/or scratch, percussion sounds and even drone and — Jesus, you could lose days in this thing.

So, if you don't have anything better to do this weekend, at least you can kill some time mixing up some crushing riffs for a good old-fashioned bedroom throwdown. Head to the Djenerator's website to jump down the rabbit hole.