The smile on my face was permanent after downloading and installing bleep!BOX. The interface is straight forward, and if you have just a little experience with step sequencers you feel at home immediately. bleep!BOX is programed by David “Whitenoise” Wallin, who is no blanksheet in the digital audio world. He developed Jeskola Buzz tracker plugins from the first hour on and is developing innovative plugins for other DAWs as well. It feels good to see experienced coders like him move to mobile platforms. Let's see what he came up with so far.

Overview:

After the loading- and the welcome- screen bleep!BOX is immediately recognizable as a groove box interface in the tradition of the Roland classics TB 303 or the TR series. Though it has some advantages, courtesy of the touch screen interface. One of the very cool facts is that it can be completely thump operated. You hold the iPhone in landscape mode and operate like playing a video game. This supports the kind of creative trance one can enter making game boy music for example. Good thought went also in the way in what direction you hold your iPhone: the speaker is on the upper right side, making it harder to mute it with the hand by accident and the headphone plug is less in the way as well.

The interface is spread over 6 pages. To navigate between them press the button in the top right corner.

Seq: for pattern creation

Edit: for sound parameter editing

Mot: For parameter automation (motion)

Perf: For live performance control featuring part mute, part trigger pads and loop length control

Data: load save as well as copy paste etc.

Global: Add and edit some fx to your output sum.

Walkthrough:

Starting on the Seq page you will find two rows with eight steps each. Above of it you can select different parameters and underneath it you can adjust their values. To select a step it has to be tipped once and it will be marked by a green frame. To activate it tap it again and the last selected parameter values are entered. The step turns yellow. This feels a little awkward and it took me some time to get used to, because most other grooveboxes activate the step directly upon selection. But once one got used to double tapping you can even edit faster then 130 bpm, very important if you want to create live modifications in your patterns, but still no four finger instant beat creation(Korg groove box user know what I am talking about). Once a step is selected you can edit the following parameters on the seq page:

Note: within an octave, using either plus minus buttons or directly tapping on a value. Very cool and fast!

Oct: Use the plus minus buttons to transpose a step up or down one octave.

Tie: Toggle on off with plus minus buttons. This parameter is like glide on a Roland TB 303 and it connects the selected step with the following, creating a glide from one note the next.

Trigger: Adjust the strength of the note with values from 0 to 100 using plus minus buttons or a parameter slider in between them. This parameter can not only be related to volume, but other values on the edit screen as well, more on that later.

Swing: This is a part wide parameter and is comparable to the one known from the Roland TR 808, adding some groove to the straight machine rhythm.

Usually I create one step and then go to the next screen page by tapping at the upper right corner. Enter the edit screen. This is where the synthesis happens and sound designers fun begins :D All in all there are four different synthesis types spread over the ten parts. Part one to three are of the category BD/Zap, part four is called snare but can also create clap sounds, part 5 to 8 feature the synth engine, and finally part nine and ten are specialized for metallic sounds called HAT/CYM. Every engine has four sub pages

Lets take a more detailed look at the four engines:

BD Zap does exactly what it says: Select one of the basic waveforms: sine, saw, square, sin2, organ, triangle, Square25, noisy. The envelope features decay and shape, whereas decay adjusts the length and shape describes the slope of the decay. The filter of the bd/zap engine only knows saturation. It is getting more interesting in the mod section. Here you will find what makes waveforms zap :P Pitch modulation depth, rate and type give you plenty of tools to sculpt your kick drum sound and conga or plain electro blip sounds. Furthermore you can influence the impact off the step trigger value on the amp envelope and decay, whereas I have to admit that I did not understood the later without rtfm. Analogue hi hats are also easy emulated with this engine using the noise wave forms. The rest of the parameters consists of mixing tools such as level, mute and positioning in the stereo panorama. All in all this is a great drum sound design tool.

Snappy groove accentuation is usually done with a snare drum. That is where the snare engine enters the game. But it does offer many other sound possibilities, ranging from clap to rimshot. If you are familiar with the synthesis of these kind of sounds you might know that you need a base sound and noise to simulate the drum body and the snare chain. Both are available with adjustable tone and level called drumhead and snap. To create clap sounds there are the parameters crack speed and crack time. Imagine that as an LFO on the signal, creating more transients in the wave, resulting in an effect that can be associated with claps....it does not really get this point, but the real analogue drum machines after which this synthesis engine is modeled doesn't either ;) So all in all the snare engine is pretty authentic and cool. To sculpt the sound over time you have decay and shape again. The filter page is empty here. The modulation page allows to adjust the strength of the trigger to the envelope page parameters and to the drum tone.

The most versatile synthesis engine is called guess ... synth! It features two oscillators with the same waveforms as the BD/Zap engine, but they can be mixed in different ways and there for create radical different sounds. The waveforms can be added to each other (classical mixing) gated, multiply, phase modulated or classically synched for those metallic screams. This parameter alone is fun to play around with but there is more. The second oscillator can be detuned against the first one in semitone steps and finer. You can also add noise, to create those airy pad style sounds. The envelope page offers three envelopes with attack, decay and shape for the amp, pitch and the filter. Leading us to the next section, the filter. With lowpass, hipass, bandpass and notch you won't miss anything. All filters feature Cutoff and resonance. In addition the saturation can be adjusted and clipping can be toggled. You can also adjust the impact of the envelope in positive and negative values. On the mod page are again parameters to adjust the triggers impact on the envelopes plus a glide, delaying the incoming note change value.

The last engine is the hat/cym engine. It is very useful to create metallic sounds. It is not very versatile but offers a lot of possibilities for metallic noises, the other engines are lacking. It is also the most exotic engine, I had to read up the manual to understand how it works but the desired sound is fast created. Though for less metallic hat sounds it is better to use one of the other engines featuring noise generators. The envelope offers attack, decay and shape, whereas attack is great to create reverse sounds. The filter is the same as for the synth engine.

Once you have created your sound you can automate the patterns on the mot page. Simply double tap a parameter and you can enter a value for every step, return to the edit page over the page button. To deactivate automation just double tap the parameter again. Automated parameter sliders turn green, making them look slightly seasick which might be courtesy of the turbulent motion :P ..... well ok, I had a clown for breakfast....

After your pattern is created you might think: and now? Well according to the latest bleep!BOX news there is a song chaining feature coming up in the next version. While you are waiting you can still play around with the perf screen, and that is a lot of fun!

The performance screen can be operated in three different modes. Loop, mute and pads.

In the loop mode you can FSU by using two fingers to determine the loop length. If you hold one finger on a step it will result in sweet retrigger frenzy. You can apply this either on the whole pattern or just the selected part.

The next is mute, and is cool to build things up. Tap a number to mute the part, alternatively mute all or none. What I like about this feature is that mutes will be saved alongside the pattern, allowing you to load the pattern starting only with a kick for example and then slowly add the rest of the parts, creating the tension you want on the floor.

Last there is the pad mode. It allows you to trigger the 10 sounds and record this into the sequencer.

Finished playing you want to save your hard work. You do this on the DATA screen. Patterns , or parts can be saved and loaded separately. You can also permanently delete them here. The data page also sports the edit features copy (copies the step), copy part only, paste and clear part. Apart from the copy button pretty self explanatory. Something very positive is the fact that the sequencer does not stop while loading or saving, it just runs on, solid as a tank.

The last page is the global page. It offers a slider to determine the length in 16 step steps (stepping on the toe of language here...arrr... that clown again). The rest of the parameters here are part of a delay effect that can only be applied globally. The delay is nice to fsu with low delay length values, but I prefer using a Kaos pad for this kind of stuff.

Critique:

The sliders in the edit page should all be like the BPM slider on the seq page, because I see myself trying to hit those little knobs during performance: ouch! I would love to see a part specific send parameter to the delay for obvious reasons. It would be also cool to have a mute button for the current selected part on every page.

Then sometimes I encountered an prompt that seemed to have no effect but beeing annoying:

Fortunately this does not happen very often and all in all Bleepbox is an extremely stable release. I did not encounter any hickups or crashes, this is wxtremely good work!  :)

Conclusion:

I think it is not exaggerated to to say that an iPod Touch/iPhone and bleep!Box are all you need to bring a dance floor to boiling point. This neat software turns your pocket device into a full fledged groove box and I played live acts with less sophisticated devices. The sound is really versatile and ranges from digital analogue sounds to FMish digital stuff and the drum synthesis is awsome as well allowing for really lively patterns together with the motion sequencer. Of course it is not perfect yet, but the next update has already been submitted according to the webpage and I am looking forward to a even more improved workflow over time. So even though it says headphone use suggested on the start page, I recommend a PA with 10 KW minimum ;)

Website:

http://www.bleepboxapp.com/

Get it in the Apple iTunes APP Store: HERE!

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