Throwing hardware at it!

I tend to keep with a policy of skipping each generation of hardware and since I dutifully skipped the 4th generation iPad, I broke down and bought an iPad Air. There was a $200 buyback that I took advantage of for my ancient and unused iPad first generation as well so it wasn't quite as much of a wallet shock. I went with the 64GB model because I do store tons of music samples on my iPad and the size does matter! I opted for the full size model instead of the Mini because again, with synth apps, the size matters.

Early reports have been very good related to music making on the Air and I can confirm that most of my performance concerns on CPU have been addressed. If you follow my tutorials or postings on Noatikl,  you might remember that I used mainly Sampletank due to its ability to give 4 MIDI channels without too much CPU overhead provided you use a light DAW along with Audiobus.

So, with the Air, I decided to try a piece with a heavy DAW and with 3 concurrent synths recording. The heavy DAW is my favorite, Auria and the synths are the Dxi synth, Thor and Alchemy Mobile. I drove all 3 synths with Noatikl which would usually bring my 3rd gen iPad to its knees. Without a hitch I was able to record all three concurrently into Auria, which is a very heavy DAW by itself.

Another recent addition to music making on the iPad is inter app audio as I blogged before and I added some additional tracks using the Arturia Oberheim SEM synth and my old standby Sampletank for the violin.



Throughout the piece, Auria was responsive and the tracks all recorded without issue. I think I can now add many more concurrent tracks with Noatikl and Auria is now a go-to DAW for me. I'll be posting more as I experiment further. Thanks for reading!

Noatikl for iPad pt. 3

In the last tutorial, we got as far as attaching Noatikl to Sampletank via virtual MIDI and actually getting our kick drum working. To do that, we created a fixed pattern voice and provided a pattern for the kick drum which has two lines. In this post, we'll go into explaining the pattern a bit more in depth. See links on right for other tutorial parts.

If you listen carefully to the kick drum pattern, you may notice a few things:

• Obviously there is some variation in the rhythm since two patterns are used
• The volume of each kick varies somewhat

Let's start with the first pattern: <50 R 60 -180>

All patterns in Noatikl appear between <> brackets (which is a pain to type on an iPad!). There are several types of patterns supported by Noatikl - this pattern is a rhythmic pattern as indicated by the "R". For a drum part, the note pitch isn't usually important since you just strike the instrument. Each beat in Noatikl is represented by 60. For a rhythmic pattern, positive numbers are notes, and negative numbers are rests. The initial number (50) is used as a weighing factor determining the probability that the pattern gets played assuming you have more than one pattern.

For the kick drum, our other pattern is : <50 R 60 -90 30 -60>. Following the logic above, you can see that this pattern will play a kick on beat 1 and the 2nd half of beat 3. The total of the numbers is 240 or 4*60 which is 4:4 time. Intermorphic has more documentation on patterns here.

Using what we already know, we are now going to add a sort of high hat part to the drums. We could add a new voice from the design page by clicking + and selecting another voice type, but to save time, we will copy and past pe our kick sound. Tap on the kick and press the copy button to put it in the clipboard. Tap kick again and press paste. This gives us another voice connected to MIDI channel 10.

Tap the new voice, press edit and rename it to "hh".

We need to select another patch to get our desired sound. Bring up the voice edit screen for the hh and experiment with different patches (use the patches starting with "D" for drum sounds. I found that for the drum kit we selected in Sampletank, patch D047 sounds good even though it isn't labeled as a high hat.

 

When you have a pattern defined, I like to hit play and then audition different patches to pick one I like. For our pattern, press the pattern button on the left of the voice edit window and enter the following 2 patterns:

 

The first pattern plays a series of 8th and 16th notes and the second pattern is silence! Th 75/25 numbers mean that 75% of the time, the notes will play. 25% of the time the hh will not play. This provides some variety but we want to hear a bit more syncopation. We could create a number of alternate patterns, but there is another way to provide variation.

In the Voice edit screen, select the Basics button on the left and move the slider for "Notes rest %" to 10. This will randomly replace notes with rests 10% of the time which makes the hh tapping more interesting.

 

We're starting to get a beat going. Next we want to add a snare sound between the kicks. We could create another pattern on alternate beats but this time we are going to use a different voice type. The voices we have so far are "Fixed Pattern" voices. For the snare we are going to use a Following voice. Basically, we want the snare to follow the kick drum one beat behind the rhythm.

To create the snare, let's copy the hh and paste it like before and edit the name to "snare". While on the Basics edit screen, we will change the voice type to "Follows" and we will select patch D045 - I happen to prefer its sound to the snare patches.

Next, we need to select the Follow button on the left and tell the voice which voice it should follow. We will also change the Units selection to Beats (60th of a) and will set the delay slider to 60 to give a one beat delay. We will also change the Percent to 80% so the snare only plays 80% of the time for more variety. Note- setting the delay to 60 is difficult! Get a number on the slider that is close and then press the + or - button to get the value.

This is closer and closer to a full kit! Next post, we will finally finish off the drums. Often, the drums in Noatikl take me the longest to set up.

 

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Noatikl for iPad pt. 2

This is the second part of my tutorial on using Noatikl for iPad with Virtual MIDI. You can check out the first part on the link at the right.

In the last tutorial we got as far as setting up Noatikl with one voice hooked up to MIDI channel 10. In this part, we will set up the app that will receive the MIDI events. We are going to use IK Multimedia's Sampletank app. Sampletank is a great choice for Noatikl because it supports up to 4 MIDI channels with just one instance of the app. One thing to be careful of with The iPad is how many apps are running at one time. Add too many and you get stuttering.

For this song we will use only Sampletank but you could add additional apps for other MIDI channels if your iPad can handle it.

The screen below shows the sample tank app. To set up the instruments select each part button (A through D) and the desired instrument and sample. I picked Tech House 2 for the drums. While you're here, you can pick instruments for the other channels. My choices are below.

On this screen, you have to configure what channel each instrument uses for MIDI. In the upper right of each instrument, it shows the MIDI channel. For the drum, tap on the channel. Each tap will increment it. Set the drums to channel 10 (typically used for drums). Also set the next 3 instruments to channel 1,2 and 3.

 

 

You can use the keyboard and tweak each sample until it sounds the way you want it to. The only changes I made were to the lead on channel 2. I added a little delay.

For Virtual MIDI select the menu button on Sampletank and click background audio and MIDI controllers. Red indicates it is active.

 

 

Now back to Noatikl! We're almost ready to make a noise. Go to the Design screen and lightly tap the voice. This will bring up a menu as shown below. We'll click on edit to set some options.

 

 

On the voice edit screen there are pages and pages of options. Fortunately, we'll only be dealing with a few of them. The defaults are not bad to start with. First, click on the voice name and change it to "kick"IMF you haven't already. Next click on the voice type and select "Fixed Pattern". There are many voice types in Noatikl. The Fixed Voice type will play a specific pattern or patterns that you supply.

We are going to use General MIDI patches for the drums. Select the Patch menu and scroll down to D036-Kick Drum 1. Also make sure the "Use Patch" switch is on as below.

 

Next we need to set up the pattern for the kick drum to play. Press the "Pattern" button on the left side of the screen which shows something like:

 

Click on the Patterns to show the editing screen:

For now, change the default pattern to exactly what is shown on the first line and press return. Then press the + button on the lower left of the screen and type in the second pattern. We'll explain the patterns in the next tutorial. For now just use as is.

Click on the design button again and press the play button on lower left. If all is well you should hear the kick drum from Sampletank playing now! Make sure Sampletank is still running if you don't hear anything.

Next post, we'll get into more about patterns and voices and build up our drums.

 

 

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Noatikl for the iPad - tutorial 1

I'm going to go step by step in creating a Noatikl piece that uses Virtual MIDI to drive other apps on the iPad in this example. Noatikl has a nice built-in modular synth called Partikl that you can use if you want to craft your own sounds with oscillators, drum synths etc., but Virtual MIDI lets you use any of your favorite synth apps provided that they support MIDI (most major synths seem to).
If you want all the details on Noatikl or its built-in synth, Partikl, check out the documentation at Intermorphic's website here.
To start our song, hit the menu button in the upper left corner of Noatikl.

This brings up the menu to load an existing piece or create a new one:

Press the plus button on the upper right to create a new piece. This brings up the template menu.

Assuming you are creating a Western style piece with traditional scales, select the "Scale Rules" template for your new piece. This will pre-load the internal rules for scales, rhythms etc. it does help if you have some musical training!

Next we should set up some defaults for our pieces such as tempo, scale and how we want to generate the sounds. For that you should press the piece button at the bottom of the screen to show the piece options.

This screen can be intimidating but we are only going to change a couple defaults. We will make the tempo 120 BPM and then scroll down to scale and select Pentatonic.

I also put my name in author and put a note in reminding me of the synth I am using for the sound. The grey bars in the rules show which notes or intervals will be used and the height of the bars indicates the probability for any given event. Confused? The noatikl manual goes into more detail. Note that the Pentatonic scale rule has five bars of equal height. A Pentatonic scale has five notes and we made them all equally likely to be played. Pentatonic scales almost always harmonize easily and sound good. You can always come back here later, change the scale type and immediately hear the effect on your song!

Now we should press the design button and set a few more options by pressing the gear button on the upper right of the screen.

We are going to turn off the Partikl switch since we will not be using Noatikl's built-in synth. We will turn on Virtual MIDI and MIDI clock options so these are sent to the Virtual MIDI ports.

Alright so far? Let's add a voice in Noatikl. Go to the design screen and press the + button. This time select from the Noatikl seed section a fixed pattern voice.

This voice is going to be our kick drum! In the design window, drag from the new voice and you'll see 16 'target' MIDI destinations. Drag to MIDI channel 10. Tap lightly on the voice, select edit and tap on 'Voice 1' and rename it to Kick.

At this point we have a nice song that makes no noise at all! In the next post, we will configure the target MIDI application that will be playing the notes.

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Noatikl hits the iPad! Generative music goes portable!

I'm just back from a wonderful vacation in Bermuda and was thrilled to see that one of my favorite desktop music tools is now available on the iPad - Intermorphic's Noatikl. If you're read my older posts, you know that Noatikl is basically a way to program generative music - you give your voices various rules to follow and it emits the MIDI events to play the way you instructed it too. Sort of like playing God, and who doesn't like that from time to time!

Noatikl comes with a built-in modular synth (Partikl) that you can use immediately without having to hook up virtual MIDI channels but to really get some great sounds, you will probably want to take advantage of Virtual MIDI and use your favorite synths or samplers on the iPad.

On the desktop version, its fairly easy to use up to 16 channels and the CPUs are usually up for the task. The first thing to get used to on the iPad is that you have to conserve the somewhat meager CPU on the iPad. Open up 3-4 different music apps at once and run them all in the background and you'll quickly find this a challenge!

As most initial releases go, this one has a few semi-serious bugs and niggles but I'm confident they will be addressed and there are workarounds for most of them - the worst I saw was that editing a pattern has to be done in "portrait mode" at the moment. Should be sorted in the next release.

Without going too deep into generative music, rules etc, I'll walk through what I did to create a nice chillout piece on the iPad.

First off, here it is:


I decided to use some "lighter" tools to create the sounds and record them so for this example, I avoided the excellent Auria DAW and stuck to the very light and usable MultiTrack DAW for recording.

In Noatikl, drum sounds all go to MIDI channel 10 and you create one voice for each "drum" and attach all of them to channel 10. To do this, you probably want to use rhythmic patterns instead of note patterns and you should make each voice use the GM "patch" you specify. Try to use drum kits that respect the General MIDI mappings.

In my case I used Drumjam - the "lower portion" where you can drag a kit to the pads. From Noatikl, I created a number of "fixed pattern" voices that play the exact rhythms you specify. The key to making things interesting is to create more than one pattern and give each one a "probability" of firing. So for the bass drum, I created a few patterns in Noatikl - one that played on beats 1 and 3, another with some syncopation and a third that only played once. Each had a weighted probability of 33 so that when Noatikl emits the MIDI, there will be some variation.

I did the same for the snare and high hats and then I put a very low probability on a beat 4 cymbal crash. This created a very nice laid back drumbeat on the song above. To further make things less "robotic", Noatikl lets you put "micro-delays" on each note and I varied each note from 2-4 microseconds to make the drumming a little more human sounding.

I used Virtual MIDI to hook up Drumjam to Noatikl via MIDI channel 10 so that when I start Noatikl playing, Drumjam puts out the sounds.

Next I wanted to add bass, guitar and an organ (on MIDI channels 1,2 and 3 respectively). To minimize the CPU usage, I chose to use SampleTank for the iPad. This is a good choice with Noatikl since just one instance of the app can take up to 4 MIDI channels in. This preserves CPU!

I created a simple rhythm for the bass, constrained it to a note range and told Noatikl to use a Pentatonic scale for the piece. I used a similar set of rhythmic patterns for the bassline again with a little randomness to keep it interesting.

For the Guitar, I did the same but then went into the "Chord" section of Noatikl and told the voice to use at least 2 notes and at most 5 - corresponds to how many strings. Also in the "Chord" section I put a  little delay between each note (1-2 microseconds) to give it a "strum" sound.

For the Organ, I programmed the voice to follow the guitar voice one beat behind and to harmonize with it in the Pentatonic scale. For notes I used between 1-3 notes at a time also with a slight random delay.

So with Sampletank, Drumjam and Noatikl open, I played around with the voices and tweaked until I got a nice evolving background sound. Once I liked it, it was time to fire up AudioBus and MultiTrack DAW to do some recording.

One confusing thing in Noatikl is that it can be a "source" for Audiobus, but this will only work if you are using the built-in Partikl synth. If you are doing Virtual MIDI, leave this unchecked and put the synths you are controlling into the inputs to Audiobus (in my case, SampleTank and Drumjam).

I then started MultiTrack DAW recording and pressed play in Noatikl. As the song was generating and recording, I occasionally muted and unmuted a few voices in Noatikl to bring things in and out.

After I got the recording in MultiTrack DAW, I decided to put a traditional "played" synth part as the lead. I closed Noatikl, put Nave into the Audiobus input and played back the recorded tracks while performing the lead part in Nave.

A few takes later, back to MultiTrack DAW to add some light effects, compression and fades and the song was complete.

I highly recommend that you check out Noatikl in more detail if you get the chance.