Instrum3ntal

After getting a first taste of Beatmaker 2, the exciting new music production app for iPhone from Intua, here are my first impressions.
Before I start I wanted to say that all of the exploration was done without a user manual, because one is not available yet.

Modular and Scalable

The first thing that got my attention was the modular nature of the instruments, tracks, and effects. It feels more like a traditional DAW because of the scalable nature. You can place any configuration of Keyboard (Samplers), Traditional Samplers, and Insert Tracks in the mixer. When you are in the sequencer you can add sequencer tracks or lanes, and assign them to any of the instruments. This is a huge plus, because the pad based sampler has an enormous 128 pads (8 banks) per instrument, allowing you to make it much easier when composing to separate elements that you are playing in the same sampler.

Samplers

The Samplers are the main focus of the app, there are 2, a pad based one, and a keyboard based one. The pad based sampler is similar to the one found in beatmaker 1 with the improvement of multiple banks and multiple instances. There are quite a few options for trigger modes, unfortunately I didn’t find a latching mode (or press and loop) only a hold mode (it maybe in there, but without a manual yet I am not sure.) You have your typical per pad controls, volume, pan, mute, tune. Additional controls for Filter (which you can’t automate, strange…), and Audio Routing (I will get more into this later.) The Keyboard Sampler is very much like a normal rompler style instrument, you can load up multiple samples and map them across keys then adjust ADSR, Volume Envelope, Polyphony, Glide, Filter, Filter Envelope, and LFO’s (2 of them). Again the automation for the keyboard sampler instrument is only for Volume, Pan, and Tune.

Routing and Effects

Routing and Effects are also a big part of the app, with 10 effects to choose from you can make custom effect chains for each mixer channel that really feels like it takes this pocket DAW to the next level. Some of the effects like the compressor, overdrive, eq and reverb leave a bit to be desired, but they are functional. One of the things that really sort of rubbed me the wrong way about the routing though, is that the insert effects are not really auxiliary effects but more like effects groups or buses, meaning you can’t put delay and reverb on an insert fx bus and and route another channel to it and the mains to add different amounts of effect.

Mixer

The Mixer is functional and pretty easy to use, except one glaring omission, flexibility on the main mix, there isn’t a fader on the main mix and you can’t add effects on it. If you are clipping you have to turn all the individual instruments down until you back the volume off enough. I have found a workaround by creating an FX BUS and routing everything that I would route to the main mix to that instead, the only problem with this is, if you wanted different routing with several FX BUSES you would have to control all of them individually, and it makes it so you can’t reap the benefits of using a compressor on the main mix, because they would be separate channels.

Sequencer

The sequencer works quite well, it looks very familiar, and is very similar to one found in Blip Interactive’s Nanostudio. This has the added benefit of being very familiar to Nanostudio users. It has split functions, join functions, copy, and duplicate. The note editing is very well implemented and uses a grid editor like the one found in Nanostudio, and stretching note length, moving vertically and horizontally is done the same way with handles.

The sample editor is very functional as well, and has a nice BPM signature tool which allows you to let the software know what BPM your sample is, allowing you to use the stretch function to stretch it to another BPM without affecting pitch. Similar to Ableton Live, you can select the way it stretches the sample, via a few options Complex, Drums, or Mono Timbral. I have stretched a few beats and it works quite well, it processes the sample and asks you to save it. Also included is your normal pitch shifting, copy, trim, delete, and some nice simple audio processing tools; Normalize, Silence, Reverse, Fade In, Fade Out, Cross Fade. One of the nice features of the samplers are that they support sub loops or loop points, so you can create longer samples that repeat a section, for nice pads, strings, and synth sounds. I haven’t gotten into making my own multi samples yet or creating seamless loops, but the tools appear to be here.

Chop Lab

And this brings me to one of my favorite parts, the chop lab as they call it. It is a beat slicer allowing to chop a beat up into pieces and map it across the pads of a sampler or keys if you want. This is very exciting because it is very well implemented, and is similar to what you can do in Ableton live or recycle.

File Management

File Management is well done and easy to figure out, with all the things you would expect, it also contains file tags, and search which let you tag your samples with categories of styles or whatever you like making it easier to group types of samples.

Issues

Some of the things I had issues with were the pasteboard, you can import sounds from other apps that support the general pasteboard, this seems to work just fine. I could not however get pasteboard to work going to other apps. I tried it in a few different apps. Nanostudio crashed as soon as I tried to paste, and so did Filtatron, both of which I use general pasteboard with all the time without issue. I wish Intua would just put Sonoma audiocopy and paste in their app, the benefits would be tremendous. Also I had some issues with FTP server, where my file transfers would always stop at 40%, but his could have been the network here. I haven’t tried the Soundcloud export or the iPod import so I can’t comment on these. I have also experienced a couple of crashes when adding effects.

Wishlist

Some of the features I have liked to see, are Audio tracks (I thought this one was originally coming), and a CPU meter to tell you when you are near the limit of your device.

Summary

Overall Beatmaker 2 is a great app, and some of it’s features are definitely worth the price of admission. It has some rough edges, and some strange omissions, but let’s hope that these are ironed out, because it really strives to be a full DAW in your pocket.

Video Demo and Images

Official Product Page for Beatmaker 2 at Intua.com here

Read more from Alex Matheu at his blog Click Past The Frequency

About The Author:

Alex Matheu

Alex Matheu has 9 post(s) here at Instrum3ntal.com

Alex Matheu is an electronic producer, and studio engineer. He is the founder of electronic projects; Negative Format, Parallel Project, Distraub, and Lexsine. Alex has been writing electronic music professionally since 1996, and is an owner and operator of Sector 9 Studios (electronic record label).