Music theory can be a little bit scary for learning musicians and producers. The goal of AutoTheory has always been to make it more accessible to everyone. In this quest for accessibility, the teams behind AutoTheory designed a new interface for the app, that we brought to life here at Springbeats. AutoTheory 3’s new UI is now fully vectorized, which means its controls are crispier and its window can be scaled even to full screen display if you need to. The concept is still the same: a standalone application that makes the bridge between your MIDI controller and your Digital Audio Workstation, or any audio software that accepts MIDI input, transforming the MIDI notes on the fly. It adds a handful of new features: Illustrated dialog to help you configure your DAW to work with AutoTheory New Scales! Now totalling an impressive total of 35 scales to choose from 🙂 New chord types New Arpeggiator mode in Melody Lock Save current preset Piano display at the bottom to see the notes that are being generated … plus the usual bug fixes Check out this presentation video unveiling the new user interface: Video doesn’t exist anymore. You can buy it directly from the official website or from plugin boutique. But wait, there is more! If you would like to try things out before buying, we also made a trial version. It has an integrated sampler, which means you don’t even have to configure anything, since it already includes sounds (which will automatically be downloaded the first time you run it). It is the perfect way to discover the different scales and playing modes, without worrying about anything technical. You can download the trial version from the downloads page.
You might have already noticed that Springbeats’ website doesn’t exactly look like before. We’ve switched servers and at the same time decided to redo the design so that it’s more coherent with what’s on the blog. Also, we were not showing properly the work we did as JUCE experts. Now if you want to hire us for custom development, you can see what we did before (only the projects we didn’t sign an NDA for though, unfortunately), and you have a clear contact form. Besides, mobile navigation wasn’t very good with the previous version. Now this should be much more readable! For the tech guys out there, there will be a post on my dev blog about how it was deployed with docker-machine and Let us know on facebook or twitter what you think of the upgrade!
As you probably know, we developed a very neat tool called AutoTheory for our buddies at MozaicBeats. AutoTheory is a standalone application that acts as a MIDI controller for your Digital Audio Workstation, or any audio software that accepts MIDI input. You need to disable your MIDI Keyboard controller in your DAW and activate it in the AutoTheory settings. Then, AutoTheory transforms the notes for you, according to the key and mode you chose. In the default setting, everything you’d play with your left hand on the keyboard will play a chord of this key and scale, and everything you play with your right hand plays the notes of the last chord you hit. MozaicBeats created a nice video for you to understand all the features of this amazing little application: Video doesn’t exist anymore. As the developers, we’re very proud to announce that we rocked the version 2 🙂 It has the following new features: More control for advanced users who’d like to bypass notes or use a traditional chromatic piano with the right hand, or output root notes with more flexibility. New strum modes and chord types The ability to control the transport of your DAW from AutoTheory A new Chord Memory mode which lets you record 4 chords of different lengths and play them back so that you can use the changes in melody they imply. You can buy it directly from their website or from plugin boutique.
The “Siestes Electroniques” music festival took place last weekend in our hometown of Toulouse. During 4 days, thousands of people come to chill to the sound of electronic bands, in a park of the city center. What interested us even more than drinking while laying down in the grass like roman emperors, were the “Futurism” events happening aside from the stages. It gathered hundreds of curious amateurs of professionals around a few presentations, workshops and demonstrations. Among other activities, you could make music with complete strangers through a collaborative music totem, solder synth kits, learn how to make your own instruments, how to mix, learn about the work of the professionals and artists of the area, and finally, take part to our now regular Audio Meetup. Here is a great video tour of what happened there by Cristian DÃaz Briceño (you can even see our handsome silhouettes listening very carefully at one point 😉 ): There are more photos to see on the Futurism Facebook Page. In my opinion, one of the most interesting thing to witness was how curious the public was to all this music and technology mashup. Kids were playing with the “draw-your-vinyl” installation or the music totem, and adults were really keen to know how to DIY. It also showed the public that we have great products made in Toulouse, such as the Pianoteq plugin, or the AudioGaming products. One presentation featured the founders of the local Toulouse Fablab (the first in the country!) and the London Music Hackspace. I really hope that collaborations will emerge and that we will witness the birth of the “Toulouse Music Hackspace”!
We’ve not given much news lately… which is not always a bad sign, considering that in our case it meant we had been busy working on interesting projects! One of those projects is AutoTheory. AutoTheory is a standalone app for windows and mac allowing you to make music in a creative way without thinking about music theory. Simply pick a tonality, and a scale or jazz mode, and you’re ready to improvise like a pro! Just put your hands on your midi controller: every note you play with your left hand will trigger a chord in the mode you picked, and every note you play on your right hand side will automatically be a note of this chord. Those notes are routed to AutoTheory’s midi outputs, that you can read in your favorite DAW or synth. This lets you play for hours on your perfect chord progression and melody without worrying about music maths. Now to be fairly complete, it is not the only configuration possible. You can also tell it to play different kind of scales on your right hand side (called the “Melody Lock”), use your computer keyboard instead of a midi controller, fine-tune the chords that are played for each step of the scale, play arpeggios in place of chords, use inversions or not, use voicings, separate the root of the chord to route it to a different output, etc. The guys at Mozaic, the inventors of AutoTheory, have put videos online to demonstrate what it can do and how to set it up. It has been available as a Reason Rack Extension since 2013, even making it to Berklee’s list of best Rack Extensions. We did the development of this new universal version, with a simplified user interface. Computer Music Magazine reviewed AutoTheory with a global […]
