Monday, 27 February 2012

Stochastik Drum Machine for iPad


Stochastik Drum Machine for iPad is now available in the iOS AppStore. The app lets you use a probability engine to program your beats, allowing you to create dynamic rhythm patterns and endless variation to to your drum loops.

Say goodbye to boring, repetitive drum loops and welcome a little randomness into your life.

The best thing about this app is obviously the probability engine. You can program a simple straight forward drum pattern into this thing and then use the probability engine to add a subtle variation to a drum part (say the hi-hats). This helps to give the beat that evolving feeling without making it sound completely random. That's not saying that it can't do random, if you set all of the steps to a low probability then this awesome little drum app will spit out a constantly evolving drum pattern (perfect for genres such as IDM).

I love how useful this thing is for fills and subtle changes. Say you're programming the drums for your new track but don't want to use that same loop all the way through the track. You want subtle variations to a snare fill or maybe that odd bit of percussion randomly coming in and out to keep your listeners on their toes. To program all of these little surprises by hand can take hours but if you program your beats on your iPad with Stochastik you could get this same effect in minutes, seconds even.

Of course the probability engine isn't the only thing that this app does well. It's packed with over a thousand high quality drum samples that can make an awesome addition to almost any genre of music that you can think of. Programming drum parts in Stochastik is really simple too, so even if you're not too familiar with programming drums then it should be pretty easy to learn how to use this thing. The app also has background audio, audio copy and WIST support meaning that you can wirelessly sync it with other iOS devices.

If you're taking your music seriously then you might want to use your own drum sounds or maybe even a hardware drum machine. At the moment Stochastik doesn't yet support MIDI in and out. But fear not, this will be included in the first major update to the app. Also that update will include other features such as multi channel exporting of drum sounds and mute/solo for each drum part.

All in all this is a solid drum machine app that not only offers you high quality sounds and simple programming but it also offers a truly inspirational way of programming beats and coming up with ideas. In fact I'll go as far to say that it's one of the best iOS music apps that I've seen in ages.

Here I've uploaded a video of my playing around with Stochastik, showing of a quick D&B pattern and an over the top mad glitch sequence.


Get Stochastik from the AppStore here.


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just downloaded, and I am blown away. This is brilliant!!!!!!!! Definitely needs midi in/out. When can I expect the next release?

Dan said...

I don't know when the update is due out. Hopefully soon though.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the kind words! I hope to have MIDI done in about a month. If you send an email to aaron@xitive.com, then I will email you when MIDI is done.