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 for the iPad

I got some nice feedback on my post about Noatikl for the iPad so I think I will deconstruct/and reconstruct a piece I put together today using Noatikl on the iPad along with SampleTank, one sound sample and recorded into MultiTrack DAW via Audiobus.

This is the intro posting with the completed piece. The process was to program 4 tracks into Noatikl and have Sampletank play them into the recorded piece. I think I'll go through the process step by step. Up until know, I've avoided this since folks like discchord and others do such a great job. Noatikl is niche enough that it isn't getting that much coverage and I very much prefer written tutorials to Youtube ones (probably just a sign of age).

So as an intro, here is the piece I put together on the ipad. All parts are from Noatikl with the exception of the "babbling brook" noises which are a free sample from freesound.org.




It is an ambient piece with about 8 voices in Noatikl corresponding to 4 MIDI channels. I will begin in the next post with how I set up the drums in Noatikl for iPad.

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.

Big doings in iPad synths

Nave Synth from Waldorf

Its been a fantastic and surprising couple of weeks for synth fans on the iPad. Two major music companies have come out with amazing iPad synth offerings. One, Nave from Waldorf was anticipated for quite awhile and the other, Thor by Propellerhead (the folks who produce Reason) just came out of the blue!

Nave is a synthesizer that uses a combination of waveform oscillators a little bit like the PPG offerings (WaveGenerator and WaveMapper) but in what I think is a much more approachable way. Rather than go through pages and pages of arcane and tricky settings (as in the PPG synths), most modulations and settings in Nave are at your fingertips or are a knob twist away. The sounds are very rich and the synth even includes a vocoder that can sing or play phrases you type into it. I've played a little with with it so far and got out one piece:

Like most wavetable synths, getting the exact sound you are after is a matter of experimentation. I don't find that I can predict in advance what the combination will sound like but then again, that is better suited to traditional subtractive synths. Nave joins some other great wavetable based synths already on the iPad: PPG WaveGenerator, PPG WaveMapper and Moog's Animoog.

Thor Synth for iPad

In a shocker, Propellerhead, took the powerful Thor synth from their Reason rack and ported it to the iPad. So what did they leave out or "dumb down"? NOTHING! This is the full Thor synthesizer with every feature from the desktop version. In addition, since it is on a touch screen, the controls are better, the keyboard can be locked into scales, it supports Audiocopy and Audiopaste and sounds phenomenal! This is a big robust semi-modular synth that lets you route almost any modulator to any destination. The only limits seem to be 3 oscillators at a time, 2 LFOs but you can mix and match oscillator types with Wavetables, FM, Analog, Multi-synth etc. The learning curve will be steep but I think I'm going to get a lot out of this synth!

Pricewise, these two are on the higher side for iPad synths $10 - $15. Compare that to desktop plugin prices and its a pretty easy buy.

Almost lost in the shuffle with these is an incredible Organ emulator for the iPad, Yonac's Galileo. This has fantastic emulations of 60s and 70s organs of all kinds for that retro sound.

Good times indeed.

Geeking out with Soundcloud

In my non-hobby life, I am by profession an IT specialist in Business Intelligence reporting (yawn) - probably the last time I'll mention it...you're welcome!

Being into reporting, charting and visualizing data it is no surprise that I get a great kick out of Soundcloud's statistic pages. I have a pro-account (an indulgence!) and that lets me get all kinds of cool demographics about who listens/comments/likes/downloads my stuff and some insight into why. Of course my link is available HERE if you want to boost my stats.

I can see from listener stats that many of my friends or frequent peers are listening (always nice since I listen to theirs as well), occasionally I get strangers or random fans and more thrilling, nubile young fans who are dying to meet me, but once the SPAM filters catch up, they seem to disappear (I thought it was the raw sensuality of my music...sigh).

Stats-wise, my music sits in the middle - mostly a small number of hits until I post another which inevitably slows down listens on the prior songs. What I lack in talent, I make up for in volume so I tend to post often.

Its always interesting to see if folks following me show up as listeners - one would think so, but that isn't always the case (see above...sigh).

At any rate, for those of you who listen and read - thank you! If nothing else, the listens, comments and critiques help me get a bit better at a hobby that shouldn't matter that much, but does!

Portable Music making

I thought I'd put up a post on portable music making options currently out there. Its been a few years since the iPhone and iPad explosion and there are a significant number of other devices hitting the market.  Obviously if you are only in the phone arena, the market is very diverse and mixed between Android, Apple and some notable others (Microsoft, RIM) etc.

If you are trying to make music, though, at the time of this writing its mostly a one company show still - Apple. The reason boils down to one thing - latency. A simplistic example would be with a simple piano app and latency would show itself in the delay you encounter from hitting a virtual "key" and actually hearing it.

I'm going to talk mostly about tablets for selfish reasons - I find phones still too small to really develop music on. I like having a little bit of room to manipulate sounds and the iPad (full size model) is about right sizewise for creating music.

The alternatives are the Android tablets and new tablets from Microsoft. In the case of Microsoft and Android, the CPU specs aren't bad at all, the screens are ok but at the operating system level there is still....latency - which is a show-stopper for music making. All tablets have pretty good music playback capabilities but when it comes to processing events and creating notes somewhat "immediately", Microsoft and Android vendors have work to do. Android is supposedly addressing this with each release but it will probably take time.

So, if you are looking to make music on a non-Apple tablet, you are essentially a contrarian. For reasons of your own, you may hate Apple or are looking to squeeze a few dollars. The best current options in non-Apple would be "tracker" style music makers or systems where you define patterns and play back the resulting sounds. Here latency would not be an issue. Examples might be Sunvox and/or Mixtikl (two great options on Apple that have ported to other tablets - Android, not Microsoft yet).

The options on Microsoft are fewer but with the "larger" tablet, you essentially have a full Microsoft OS which will run desktop apps. The problems are that I believe there is still latency in their drivers and if you are using a non-touch app, you are essentially just using it like a laptop. A much better option would be to just use a laptop if that is your interest.

So if you're into portable music making and have plunked down the cash for an iPad, where should you put your money? In my opinion, the two most important factors music-wise are the CPU speed and the storage. WAV files are very large and the more samples, mix downs and DAWs you buy, the more space you gobble up. You might want to forego the "cellular" option and put your money into more memory - get the 64 GB or even the 128 GB model. I find the 64 GB to be pretty good for my own very active music making. 

Due to the sandboxed file system on tablets, you will find yourself copying WAV files around from app to app (or using AudioBus as I've written about). You'll find that your battery life does go down quite a bit when you multitask and particularly using CPU hungry music apps. 

The upside of using the iPad is that the cost per app is a fraction of what desktop plugins cost you. You will save tons of money on software and can build up a huge collection of synths, samplers etc. very cheaply.

Many apps go on about their support for Midi keyboards - and if you use a very low power keyboard with the camera connection kit (or a dedicated iPad keyboard), it will work pretty well. However, I find that once I connect an adapter, usb cable and keyboard to the iPad, it no longer feels "portable". I'd rather connect up to my desktop in those circumstances. I prefer to use the unique multi-touch and aftertouch capabilities of the iPad itself in making music.