The iPad instrument-app landscape is already plenty cluttered. A quick search yields a fairly bottomless reserve of apps with which to make cool sounds on your iPad (or whatever tablet), most of them pretty cheap and most of them claiming some kind of digital music revolution or, more humbly, a noble digital music experiment. For a buck, you can get soundTable, which looks a lot like AudioMulch’s mapping/routing scheme writ cartoony or, for another buck, there’s Noise Machine for arranging huge polyphonic tone landscapes, or, of course, Moog’s much-vaunted Animoog, speaking somewhat for itself. This goes on. The folks at Vlek Records have a new one that’s pretty interesting and fun-looking, an app/instrument/MIDI controller about to go into beta release called Beatsurfing.A whole lot of MIDI controller apps out there currently — a MIDI controller sends information to some other device or application to create sound, simply — emulate various physical, IRL MIDI controllers (like an MPK). This is where Beatsurfing gets interesting. Less modeling a physical controller, moreso it takes after a sketchbook app; it’s a highly graphical instrument-builder with what seems to be capabilities beyond most “highly-graphical” music apps.The video above is self-explanatory. A user is left to draw their own interface in muted pastel shapes, which can then interact with each other in real time through a feature Vlek calls “behaviors.” So a surface can be modulated in real time by another surface. “This makes the instrument very flexible,” Vlek’s Julien Fournier tells Motherboard, “multiplying the available MIDI notes on the surface.” So, in effect, you wind up with bottomless layers of musical objects.Fournier emphasizes Beatsurfing — so named because it’s not meant to be played via tapping, rather gliding motions — isn’t a replacement for anything, just another layer. “We think the unique features of Beatsurfing will complement a setup more than replacing anything,” Fournier says. "It can get ‘on top’ of a setup and control all the devices if they are MIDI enabled It’s more about putting back the human touch to a setup than changing its components. As we were developing the app, we played an awful lot with it, and it didn't replace any of our other MIDI devices: it integrated into the setup.“The fundamental change is in the 'surf', the 'slide' of the fingers on the iPad,” Fournier adds. “Until now, most of the production is made in a 'sequential' (TR-808, Piano Roll), generative (MAX/MSP, Arpegiattors), or 'percussive' (Keyboards, MPC) manner. Beatsurfing opens the realm of 'Sliding,' 'Surfing,' which can really change the way musicians think their composition and performance.”It’s interesting to think of in the context of DAWs, and their still fairly recent rapid expansion into the mass-market (thanks, GarageBand). Beatsurfing isn’t a stand-alone instrument but looks and acts a lot like it on the surface. This isn’t the only gamey, appy MIDI controller out there — I assume — but the depth it allows is interesting, and maybe it’ll wind up opening up the DAW world even wider. In any case, sign up for the beta here.Connections:Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
Advertisement
Advertisement