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Midi sequencer with midi matrix
Hi there
I was wondering of someone could advise me on the best midi sequencer to fit my needs.
I normally use an octatrack to capture smal 1 to 4 bar midi loops to trigger both hardware and software synths and drum machines.
I'm really enjoying the iOS only approach recently and am looking at something to mimic the way I use to octatrack for short midi sequences. One app I love is Aum - I just love how easy the midi matrix makes routing. Does anyone know of an app that has something similar but than can also record midi?
Many thanks...
Comments
Infinite Looper!
[Edit: BTW, Infinite and AUM work together very well.]
I'd also take a look at genome MIDI.
And how would you rate modstep against those two? For the purpose of capturing 1-4 bar midi phrases and then rerouting them to various midi devices (both iOS and external). I looked at the two mentioned and they look great - I also see that modstep looks very interesting.
Thank you for the advice.
Infinite Looper = quick and easy to learn and use. 6 channels, 8 loops max.
ModStep = Painful initial learning hump (or 2, or 5) for most. Infinite(ish) tracks and loops. More powerful sequencing options and types.
Certainly more to the comparison than that but that's my two second take for an Octatrack user.
Well - it's much appreciated, thanks.
From what I've seen on YouTube etc, I'm feeling the pull towards modstep.. I enjoy the learning part also...
Do you happen to know if it plays nice with the nanokey studio (modstep that is)..?
Although it's probably a dumb week to be looking at getting a controller..
Warning! Too long to read
:
I have all three, but Genome is the one I use for live MIDI looping with a hardware synth. It is something I desperately want, but haven't found the perfect thing yet. Here are some thoughts/ comparisons on each.
Genome Pros:
Stable
Usable song mode
Predictable quantize on record
Usable, if not great editing - copy, paste, move, of groups of notes is fairly streamlined.
Groove templates
Quickly select notes by sliding finger on top of timeline
UNDO! And it is a nice big button. None of the others currently have it.
You can name MIDI CC
nice chord entry feature, play a chord on the keyboard, then drawn in that chord with one swipe on the piano roll.
Slaves to MIDI clock well. Receives song position pointers correctly.
Supercool remix section. Live transpose, windowing.
Genome Cons
Zooming in piano roll is weird. 4 measure limit to how far you can zoom out. Easy to lose track of where the playhead is, offscreen.
Clips in clip launch area are small. Awkward to rename, no way to color intentionally. You have to remember what all your parts are. There are tons of tracks onscreen, whether you want them or not.
Changing number of measures per pattern is buried.
Bug with increasing measures while pattern is playing, it can stick on the old number.
MIDI CC display is inscrutable. Just a bunch of tiny dots of different colors, no clue what each is. You can quantize midi CC to the grid however, which is cool.
I use Genome. I pray for some improvements to the zoom, automation, and clip launch page, but, as is, it works.
Modstep Pros:
Good concept.
Beautiful UI
Excellent MIDI automation. Included template library for lots of gear, software.
Customizable clip launch display, with size. Only see the tracks you are using. Name stuff easily.
Fairly straightforward midi routing.
Piano roll note collapse: only see the notes in the pattern.
nice onboard instruments
Thumbnail of notes in clips, easy to remember what each part is.
Modstep Cons:
No easy way to do time signatures other than 4/4, without a math degree.
No undo!
It's gotten better over the last year, but I don't trust the stability.
No groove templates
Awkward to redo a take. There should be a button to toss the take, and do it again.
Have to arm tracks before recording. I know it is a feature, but it is a stumbling block for me.
No song mode, specifically. However, you can play the clips in order, like Gadget, and choose the number of times you repeat each.
Slave to MIDI clock has been weird. It would do things like think the BPM was 1 BPM or 999 BPM. Doesn't take song position pointer, so problems starting anywhere but the beginning of the timeline in the master.
I wish the developers of Modstep the best, it is an ambitious project, and desperately needed by the music community, but to be fair to prospective customers, it is a work under construction. Interested to see where it goes, but it still feels experimental at this point.
Infinite Looper Pros:
It is different, simpler than the others. Made for loops.
Usable midi routing
Seems stable
Easy to erase a bad take and redo it. Just swipe left on a clip, hit erase.
Big clips in the clip launcher. Shows measures and playhead in the clips
Has some good macros for duplicating measures within a pattern
Audio to MIDI
Has a cool step entry mode, for classic step sequencing, the others don't have this.
Has a song mode. Haven't used it, but it is there.
Has a section for your notes/lyrics, nice!
Infinite Looper cons:
No Undo. The developer says it is coming soon.
Autosave, rather than conventional save. That coupled with no undo makes it hard to recover from mistakes, if you don't know what you did. Autosave can be bad for experimentation, because it makes you have to duplicate a project, to have a safety, before you do something bad, rather than save it after you did something good.
Difficult MIDI CC automation. You have to tap to increment through every CC number (which you have memorized, right?) to find the one you used, then it is flaky to edit, it will ignore some of the drawn in messages. No way to clear program changes other than deleting the clip and starting over. No way to find 0 in the pitch bend automation, it just plays out of tune if you draw in anything on the pitch lane. I guess it could work fine for just live CC recording, as long as you never make a mistake. There is a clear CC button, but you have to find the CC you recorded, by tapping through the list of 127. There is a clear all CC's command, but it is buried.
Audio to MIDI doesn't work well with voice and the mic, lots of random notes for you to painstakingly clean up. Lacks a threshold control. Good chance it will work better with direct sources, like guitar.
Copy and paste is a bit buried.
Hard to work in the piano roll, because it tends to ignore your touches on the notes as often as not.
Zoom is just a button you tap to zoom in and out, a lot of times.
No preroll with recording, I could find (correct me if there is one). Say you are recording a 16 measure pattern, well, wait for 16 measures to click away before you come in on the 1st. Could work if you had it hooked to a footswitch, though.
Quantize isn't working right for me. Wants to round to the previous beat, rather than the closest beat. Easily can ruin what you played, and there is no undo. Just play it right, I guess, or painstakingly align each note by hand.
Was having problems with hanging notes when I stopped playback. Wants to continue to the end of the measure (or the note?), rather than shutting up when you push the button.
All in all I think Infinite looper, at this point in it's development, is great for basic recording and looping MIDI notes. Probably the easiest to use, to that end. I would wait for more development before using it for extensive editing or CC automation.
That's quite the right up. Agree with most of it but I'd suggest that pointing out the stuff missing or rudimentary about IL is to sort of miss the point. Its main feature is speed; fast and easy MIDI looping.
Comments on the comments aside, this passage perfectly articulates my feelings about autosave in any app that both encourages experimentation and offers the ability to save states. I've tried to get this sentiment out of my head before a few times but always failed. The take on before/after should be in a UX book.
And not just mistake recovery. Sometimes you experiment and it's just not good. Let's start over! Nope, unless you did the before/safety dance. DM1 has always been this way.
What is the purpose of manually saving chosen states if the app constantly overwrites them?
Auto backups are good too! The two shouldn't be conflated though. Nanostudio, among others, does a nice job of supporting both. Every project has both an autosave file (constantly updated) and last-save file. mS manages both but in a pretty over the top way.
Another big infinite looper differentiator is that it's the only one of the three available as a universal app.
Thanks so much for your detailed answer. I have a year of pretty heavy travel ahead so I'm effectively trying to recreate some pieces I use at home on the road, with the hope of being able to integrate what I do, while away, into my studio setup.
While modstep looks amazing I really am keen on the stable factor. I guess I'll visit them both at some point - but I'll start with the more stable option.
I really like the idea of the simplicity of IL, however I've so many times been at the point where I learn a piece of soft- or hardware and end up wishing it did x,y & z. And as @syrupcore said I think the essence of IL is that very simplicity. I just know, for me that I'd hit my head off the ceiling of the limitations pretty fast.
It's a tough one for the devs - finding that balance between function and constraint.
Thanks again, I'm sure your post will be helpful to many.
many thanks @Processaurus, you answered questions I had for some time.
Did Pro Midi fit into this conversation? https://appsto.re/gb/FH8ST.i
It would certainly look to - thanks for pointing it out.
Thanks for reading all that!
Certainly looks like the right feature set, have you used the current version? I notice no updates since April 2015. Just a word of caution, not a problem, if everything works right with the latest iOS's, after all, the beloved Samplr is that old.
ProMIDI has it's own different set of shortcomings but it's a capable app. Comes in a bit cheaper than the rest if I recall. Actually, Aleph Looper is the iphone version of IL and its only $5. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/aleph-looper/id1107302288?mt=8.
EASY
iPad = Genome
iPhone = Infinite
Alternatives I have also used and enjoy ---- Lemur made sequencer
@Glasside are you more likely to program patterns or record them live?
Also, I wouldn't be too put off by modsteps 1.0 instability. It's pretty solid at this point.
What issues have you had? Curious, because it looks like just the ticket.
@RustiK does your Lemur sequencer record midi?
Honestly, it's been a while so I don't really recall. I remember general futziness issues here and there. The main deal breaker for my setup was that it only communicates over a single hardware port. Sort of like Beatmaker where you set the port for the app and then can only set MIDI Channels per track. Genome may be this way too; I can't recall as it's been a while. IL and MS both allow for per track port+channel.
I would say that it's 70/30 recording versus programming. But getting to fiddle with the midi - reroute it afterwards and general farting about is the idea - that's the part I love with the octatrack, everything is just ammo for that machine.
Quite a few years ago I tinkered with iOS music making apps, but it was all a bit basic. I then got very into the whole elektron universe and just recently got back into looking at the iOS side of things. Pretty mind-blowing how this world has blossomed in a few years. To put it mildly!
You want modstep. If you can learn an electron machine, modstep won't be much more cryptic.
I find the electron stuff to be a lot less obtuse than they are given credit for. I guess they're more deep than complicated - and for sure if you learn one, they're all pretty familiar.
I've watched quite a few videos on modstep now and it's very tempting for sure - looks to be very powerful... They all look pretty good to be fair..
Genome is like that, you can decide which ports you use globally, and per track you just can choose the midi channel. Hasn't been a problem for me, I'm happy using the channels, but it would be a deal breaker if you want to run more than 16 things, or if you couldn't change an app or piece of gear away from recieving midi in omni, on all channels. Ports are nice, though, if only because they have a name rather than a number.
For the first time (for me) I have to raise caution to ModStep. Having worked on my set-up for a couple of days (yeah, mentally complex, though all parts of it are straightforward) I last night was going to do my first tests.
That is when I find out that even though I've armed the tracks, I can hear all instruments when playing on my midi keyboard, but ModStep simply refuses to record them. I can see them being triggered, I can see the midi lights blink in the right places, and most importantly, I can hear the instruments. The midi just doesn't "stick" when recording. I thought I was going mad, so undid my entire setup just to hunt for what I thought was my set-up failure. I could repeat it even it the simplest of setups.
So I did what I always do, and Googled this forum (as the search here sucks) only to find that this indeed is a known bug that others have encountered. The only current workaround seem to be to either set midi in channel to "all" (which totally defies my entire intended setup where I can pick 1-12 instruments out of 12 pre-wired ones), OR to use a midi keyboard via DIN contacts (for which I would have to involve my laptop setup which, again, defeats the purpose of having it all mobile in my iPad, and then I might as well use Ableton in any case).
So, word of warning. I still love both the look and the concept of ModStep, but it simply isn't there yet and given that AppBC have gone completely silent, even removed forums for Touchable, and not communicating at all for months leave me with little hope they will solve this any time soon.
@hellquist dumb question, but did you arm the tracks for recording?
Of course.
I have not only verified in a multitude of ways that the bug exists, but I can now also verify that the suggested solution I found here in AB forum actually works. I went and got my ICM4+ (which a friend had borrowed) and connected my midi keyboard to it via DIN contacts, as opposed to my USB connection. I also set the midi channel input to "any source". Now it works as it was supposed to do. I normally prefer named routes all the way, as that normally eliminates confusion later on (and any "catch-all", especially if in many places, like in apps where midi handling is crap, can really mess things up) as I had a very rigid set-up in MidiFlow (the step before ModStep) in any case. It now works wonderfully again, and I can manage both AUM and ModStep from my midi keyboard/pedalboard, with only minimal interaction on the screen.
Arming the track is actually required in my set-up to get audio out in any case. If a track isn't armed nothing I do on my keyboard can be heard. The button on my keyboard that arms the track also is the button that dictates where midi will be sent (via MidiFlow).
This was the resulting noodle when I got it all working this evening