Recommended: Modulor for AudioCubes

Do you feel that your digital audio workstation software (DAW) is great for recording, but not the place where you want to develop musical ideas?

We have the perfect application for you. Modulor for AudioCubes is a simple but powerful software application that lets you host your favourite software instruments and quickly develop musical ideas.

In this application, AudioCubes become the center of the music making and improvisation process, and are used to record, loop, route and process MIDI information, which is then used to drive a rack of your favourite software instruments.

AudioCubes become an intuitive, direct, hands-on interface to record, vary, process and assemble the components of your music.

Software that handles a specific task

Is that software on your computer a DAW? Or is it a tool for musical idea development? Or is it a live performance tool? Or a DJ tool? A tool for sound design ? For jamming and improvisation?

We believe software should handle one specific task as well as possible. If you need it to do something else, you probably need a different piece of software to do it.

That’s why modulor focuses on letting you record parts and put them together in various ways, to come up with a lot of interesting combinations and ideas easily.

Because modulor has a limited feature set and is highly focused on one task, it helps you concentrate on listening, recording and interacting with the components of your music and your software virtual instruments.

Easily record, process and combine

Modulor lets you easily record notes from your favourite MIDI keyboard or controller into a looping recorder (one per cube).

Keeping time is straightforward: Modulor has a built-in metronome with variable volume and seperate audio output. A global tempo for the loops and metronome can easily be set.

Bringing a loop in is a matter of placing an AudioCube in the network. Taking a loop out is done by removing a cube. Putting together various loops to build up unique musical ideas is a matter of putting cubes physically together.

You can easily explore how the parts you recorded can be combined to create many unique musical ideas, using the AudioCubes hands-on hardware interface.

Assign colours to cubes to help you remember which part of the music goes where. Map colours to keys you’ve used while recording the loops, so you know you’ll always be in key when you bring cubes of the same colour together.

Powerful musical processing

You can instantly get many different musical variations of your loops or live MIDI input, through the powerful built-in MIDI effects, such as the arpeggiator, transposer, echo and chord generator (one can be set per cube).

Each of the effects has settings which can be used to finetune the result of the effect. Each effect has up to four output variations. Choosing among the output variations of the effects is as easy as changing a cube’s orientation.

Applying multiple MIDI transformations one after the other is easy: just build a physical network of cubes. Each cube will apply a transformation, and MIDI will flow from the source (the loops you created or live MIDI input) to the sink (your software instrument rack).

Change the location of cubes and their orientation to try a different chain of MIDI processing. Discover variations of your initial musical input you didn’t think of.

Use your favourite instruments

Modulor has an instrument rack, which is capable of hosting your favourite VST or AudioUnit software instruments through a built-in plugin manager. You can easily manage multiple plugin directories and scan them for plugins, add them to the rack and set their volume. Sound in Modulor is generated through these software instruments and can be output to your favourite professional audio interface supporting ASIO or CoreAudio.

MIDI recorded and processed in Modulor can easily be routed to the instrument rack, turning your musical data into sound.

Parameters of the instruments can easily be controlled using the sensors of AudioCubes and your hands, similar to previous software for AudioCubes, like LoopShaper or MIDIBridge.

Up to four sensors per cube can be mapped to instrument parameters. They can be mapped to the same instrument or different instruments.

Because you can control 4 parameters of an instrument simultaneously with your hands and fingers, you can reach a “parameter space” of the instrument which is hard to reach using classic MIDI controllers such as fader boxes or knob boxes. Using knobs or faders, you have individual control over 2 parameters at best.

If you don’t have software instruments yet, we provide some links below to sites where you can download some for free.

Works with other software

Modulor runs stand alone, and just needs software instruments to create sound (see the modulor application page for links where you can download free ones).

After developing the ideas and components for a new track, you can record and export the musical information as MIDI files with multiple tracks, ready to import into your DAW software, where you can further add audio tracks, arrange the song and create a mix.

If you want to save your setup in Modulor, that’s easily done using bank files.

More information

For more information about Modulor, visit the application pages at http://www.percussa.com/applications/modulor/