I’d like to dig into those included sounds just a little bit to tweak them. An automation track for the filter or some LFOs for modulation would be great. A few effects would be nice the ability to add a delay would greatly enhance the sound possibilities. I had hoped that this new version would open 1BitDragon up to the world of MIDI beyond the import/export of files because it’s a decent compositional tool that could be a fabulous way to sequence your hardware synths or modular. There’s a global reverb but there are no effects to use on the sounds, there’s no automation, no editing of the instruments and no support for VST plugins or instruments.įrom that point of view, not a lot has changed since version 2. There’s no choice over the audio engine, it just uses whatever is set up as the default in Windows. There’s no MIDI support either for controllers or for routing out to external gear. However, it’s difficult to see it as anything other than a fun music-making app because of the things it doesn’t do or have. It has the feel of an iPad app on a desktop computer. What’s missing?Īs I said, 1BitDragon is self-contained and in the context of being a simple, easy-to-use, music-making fun box then it does the job nicely. It’s a pretty cool way of capturing your music.
Sequencing software for mac mod#
In Live Mode you do a whole performance of your song, swapping patterns, looping sections, muting and soloing parts and playing with the filter and mod wheel and have it recorded to a wave file live. These are really quite good and offer a lot of less intentional variation as opposed to the direct notes of the Accompaniment. You have 24 different presets which pop up and show you what they are in a window so you can select one. While you have an arpeggiator function under the Tool button which adds notes to your grid there’s also a separate Arpeggiator that uses the notes on the grid to generate arpeggiation without replacing them. The other thing to watch is that as soon as you enable Accompaniment it will replace whatever is on that grid and so get ready on the Undo button if you don’t want to lose your work. I think this is probably an oversight as it would be much better to be able to select these things directly. I’m sure in version 2 a window came up listing all the variations and you could choose one, just like does when choosing sounds or Arpeggiators (which we’ll come onto in a minute). One snag is that you have to click through each variation one at a time. These should be the default bank, not the regular instruments – now my tune is getting interesting. This is a library of 80 simple synth waveforms covering bass, lead, pad and synth and they sound great. However, with a flick of a switch, you can access the 8-bit chiptune instruments and these are a completely different experience. Some of the sounds have variations with longer release times so you can have sustained notes instead of the single blips normally associated with grid sequencers. These are made from Open Source samples and SoundFonts – they’re OK in a General MIDI kind of way but don’t have any editable parameters. There are 175 regular sounds covering things like bass sounds, pianos, harps, effects, organs, strings, synths and voices and each of the 4 tracks can have its own sound. SoundsġBitDragon is completely self-contained and comes with its own instrument sounds and drum kits. That’s the basic premise of 1BitDragon grid sequencing with a bit of manipulation, but from there developer Nicolas Morin has built-in a load of music-making tools to help you shape your ideas into music. Under the Tools button you can fill in some notes with arpeggiation, Flip them about a horizontal axis, Shuffle the notes which makes very small changes or randomise which completely replaces your notes with something randomly generated over all 8 bars – use with caution. These step the whole pattern up and down the grid in pitch or forwards and backwards a step at a time. On the far right of bar 8 are some arrows. Once you have a handful of notes on the grid there are some useful tools available to move them and mess them about. You can loop any number of bars and even jump between bars with a click like launching a clip or a scene in Ableton Live and always stay in sync. These are known as a block and you can have 30 blocks in a song. Each grid extends for 8 bars giving you up to 128 steps for a sequence.
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