finished up my first BM3 track. had to take it into ableton for the last touches…really wanted to try doing it all in the app but the daw side is just not there.
https://soundcloud.com/joekehoe/svbm3
stock beatmaker 3 sounds + sunvox for the synths/FX and patterning for the drums. (all sampled into the BM3 sampler, no IAA or AUs)
stuff i’m still struggling to figure out:
-automation is extremely finicky, there’s no ‘add point’ button, you have to draw a line and then immediately change to the selection tool. it causes a lot of heartbreak.
-moving audio from one audio track to another in song view. pretty sure this is impossible, but why??
-there’s a brutal bug where if you open up a pattern in an audio track, edit it and then press trim, the whole program crashes without saving. this is crucial to my workflow so every time i started getting into a flow state i would forget, do it, crash the program, and lose my work.
-the labels are pretty baffling. the compressor meter seems to take you from no compression to “-60db” reduction just by lowering the threshold half a db. the limiter doesn’t actually limit the sound at the level you’re at.
-the filter/eq is pretty weak. can’t adjust q/boost independently of each other. somewhat mitigated by using the “band shelf” but it’s weird.
-“repeat” vs “duplicate” figured out the difference but not before my project was covered in hundreds of duplicates for no reason with no easy way to clean up
-the scene/pattern/song button is in a dumb place for me. i felt like the pattern editor is distinct enough that it should go between song mode and mixer window. i clicked the four tabs on the left looking for the pattern editor pretty much every time i tried to use it.
-overlapping clips. you can have multiple patterns on top of each other in the song mode. no way to tell without deleting the top layer and seeing what’s under there. not sure if it’s a bug or not, it is handy when you have two audio clips you need to cross fade since there’s nothing like that available
the sampler and modulators are awesome. you can do basically anything in this app, but with the current workflow you almost definitely don’t want to. when i was arranging i thought i had made a mistake depending on the audio tracks instead of the more flexible sample banks, but when it came time to mix i was losing my mind trying to jump in and out of the banks between each element. maybe the best way would be to do an entire track inside one sample bank. it just feels wrong to input 30 second clips as midi.
-995 other paper cuts
the app is great so hopefully this isn’t too negative. i think i just need to let go of my dreams of doing a full mix on the ipad and try to figure out how to embrace a more op-1 style of work in BM3
yep there are bugs I’m hitting too and some design decisions which took me a while to adapt to. Seems like the more I use it, the more comfortable and fluid things feel tho. Kind of like my early days on OT I guess, learning where everything is and the best option per task. Like you say, definitely not a daw replacement for me either, but I’d say it’s shaping up to be a serious alternative to (or useful in addition to…) other hardware sampler/sequencers out there while also being pretty unique…
All the fun quirkiness/speed of using the Op1 ‘playable’ sequencers/arpeggios without any of the Op1 limitations/fiddly workarounds etc… + timestrech, new/more fx, ability to edit notes/add new variatons etc after recording, stereo sounds/fx/resampling etc etc …