My ideal beat maker
Note: if this already exists please let me know!
The limitations of all drum machines/sequencers is that they rely on individual samples, or loops, or sliced loops. This means you spend forever auditioning samples before you can even start making a beat. Ableton make it easier than most by allowing you to import audio to midi (as does Logic 10 I believe), but still, you need to have the right sampled loop to begin with. And even worse, you’re generally relying on the same sample sets everyone else has got, unless you’re sampling and remixing your own sounds - and quite frankly who can be bothered to do that? (Lots of people, I realise, but as someone who wants to get beats down quickly to build songs around, I usually don’t have the motivation for this).
Imagine instead if you made a beat this way. Start with a kick sound. Now manipulate that one sound - and I’m imagining this on the iPhone, so think of using hand gestures, taps, or moving the iPhone itself - like a piece of putty. Squeeze it to make the kick more condensed and 909-like; stretch it out to make it fatter; press into it to make it bitcrushed; pull it in all all different directions to make crazy noises. When you’ve got the perfect sound, tap out the rhythm. Done. Now move on to the snare, hats, percussion etc, and work them the same way.
By the end you’ve manipulated maybe five or six individual starter sounds and created something ‘unique’ - much better than wading through tons of samples to get the same effect.
I’ve no idea if this is possible. It would, I assume (and I’m so far from an expert it’s laughable), require the software to be streaming a huge amount of samples all at once to make it work - like BFD but even more intensive. Because it wouldn’t be about taking one sound and just adding effects, it would be about manipulating a sound so that all possible sonic directions are at your disposal. You could shift from a realistic Ludwig-sounding snare to an 808 handclap to a Neptunes crunch to some crazy sci-fi thing just by gesturing with your hands.
Is this idiotic? People who know about this sort of thing, please let me know :)
