Developed by blue mangoo

Available in the iTunes App Store

Derek Buddemeyer’s Drum Session is a simple, quick and great sounding way to create and edit acoustic drum tracks. 

Packed with 30 sets of acoustic drum samples, and 3600 editable patterns and loops in a very simple interface. The key word here is “acoustic”. This is not a drum machine with artificial or synthetic sounds. No 808 or the likes. This is all about real live drums from the real world. 

Drum Session uses a familiar touch, drag and drop workflow. First you select the Kit, next select the Genre, then select the Groove, and finally the pattern. Touch, hold and drag the pattern (seen in above screenshot) up to the timeline and let go. Bang! You’re getting a track started. Select other patterns and repeat, or hold the desired pattern in the timeline at its end and drag to copy further down the timeline. So easy it’s hard. I mean that it wasn’t intuitive to me right away. That’s my fault for expecting something more complicated. I’ll explain further after this next screen shot.

I spent so much time (needlessly I might add) trying to find the pattern editor button. Where the hell is it? Why can’t I edit in a sequencer style with a piano roll that I’m used to? 

After several hours of insanity I realized finally how disconnected my brain was from the true beauty of Drum Sessions work flow. Instead of dragging the pattern upward to the timeline and cursing in vain for not being able to find the “button”, I was embarrassed to find that the same is accomplished by simply dragging downward to the keys or pads. When I let go, viola. Bingo. See now below.

Holy crap I must’ve inhaled one too many tubes of modeling glue. There it is! The editor. Just how I like it. 

So with that settled I could finally start using this childproof app to its full potential. Editing patterns is pretty straightforward as you can see from the above screen shot. One thing I didn’t like was how dim the sample labels to the far left (brought up to temporary view by touching any of the keys on the further left keyboard) are. Lots of squinting and retouching the keys to bring them back into view for indentifying each samples position. Hey Derek? Could you maybe brighten or increase the contrast or something please? Whatever you decide as long as it’s easier to see would be awesome! 

Full support for Audiocopy, Audiobus, Inter-App Audio. Record, import export etc. Nothing is missing. 

So that’s where I’ll leave this review. Drum Session is a very nice acoustic drum track maker with all the necessary editing parameters. No strange FX or anything, and honestly none are necessary anyway. The samples are high quality and the overall usability is as well. For a non-drummer type like me, this is a very welcome and thoughtfully developed app. I really like this. I think you will too. 

Nice work Derek! 

UPDATED:Feb 5 2017

Any gripes I had have been corrected or corrected improved.  Everything’s come together real nice. Much easier to see things and an already excellent app has become even better.

Phonem is developed by: Wolfgang Palm

Available in iTunes App Store Wolfgang Palm has brought us so many amazing things over the years. His contribution to the iOS music scene may not be prolific, but it has been consistently outstanding. PPG Wave Generator and WaveMapper have both become staples in many artists mobile synthesizer arsenals. Now the powerful, vocal synthesizer, VST/AU desktop plug in Phonem has come to our devices. The App Store descriptions says ‘optimized to work pretty well on iPads’, but that’s just being modest. In my opinion it works very well, and is quite strong.

Originally designed to be a vocal synth, Phonem is not limited to just its initial intentions. It is a powerful synth with a huge array of parameters with infinite combination possibilities for modulating and routing. The engine proves to be highly competent and capable of a wide scope of synth sounds. 

With a large internal phoneme inventory, working with typical vocals, detailed text to speech, time corrected samples powerful excitation generator, and so much more you won’t be short on options to create incredible expressions. 

Phonem has a powerful matrix system of 19 sources controlling 40 parameters. A little on the small side but very easy to use. 6 envelopes, 4 LFos, 2 X/Y tables and just so much detailed programmability. It’s hard to find anything this can’t do with such a brilliant mod system. Just when I thought I found a limitation, Phonem proved me wrong. Thanks to the comprehensive help options, and a little reading time I’ve found ways to get any type of sound done. You can also easily import and modify wave tables or time corrected samples from WaveGenerator or WaveMapper. Or, create your own wavetables. 

Composing your synthesized text is as easy as sliding your finger. Touch and hold the spot and drag to create the sound you want in amazing detail. Missed something? No problem, it’s easy to fix and just as easy to add more. Change the slope, cut off, length and more. The ability to layer and intensify each source is no sweat. Abrupt or smoothly blended, turn the dials to get the right effect. There’s even specific dialect options among the many options. 

Thanks to the A/B button comparing edited sounds is simple. Check the Wave and make intricate edits. Pick individual parts of the spectrum or draw the frequencies. Everything is nicely placed on the screen making it so easy to work on certain pieces. Moving among the various modes to work with never gets convoluted. The redesigned browser of sounds can be filtered to very specific patch types.

There’s a nice delay and reverb unit built in. The programmable resonance filter is very well done and can bring flexible degrees of sound effects. If you spend some time with it you’ll find tons of new ways to create unusual FX. All around Phonem is a packed with quality and no detail is anything less than exceptional. 

There is no shortage of control which promotes a sound designing suite of massive potential. Connecting with Audiobus 2 or Inter-App audio works perfectly. I never lost connection or suffered any crashes. Phonem has been a real joy for me to work with, and I’m still finding more possibilities every time I open it up. 

Thank you Wolfgang Palm for another truly remarkable effort. 

I’ve said it before, and made myself a liar. I was ending a hiatus or “break” at some point in the near future. I didn’t. I just ended up forcing myself to make promises I wasn’t truly able to keep. Not because of any malicious intent, or purposeful irresponsibility. I just didn’t know what I needed to do. Ever feel like that? Like you should do something, and end up saying you were going to do it, but later regretted promising? Truth is I was dishonest with myself. Things in life got wonky and I didn’t know what I should do? 

Instead of trying to communicate the nature of my life’s wonkiness, I tried to pretend everything would be fine by a certain date or time. No way that was possible. I also didn’t want to tell everybody about personal problems. Not again. I did that, and I received incredible support and help that kept me and my family from being buried alive. I can’t ever fully convey how much my family and I appreciated that help. It made such a huge difference. Unfortunately it didn’t resolve everything completely. I couldn’t possibly ask again, or even appear to be hinting at it. I knew I couldn’t even let on that major issues remained. My reasoning was that it’s my problem, I got a lot of help, amazing support, and there are things I just couldn’t bring myself to put back out in the open. I had to deal with the remaining obstacles myself. I’m very sorry to have done it so mysteriously without even telling people I consider friends. Didn’t want to bother you, you all have your own things to cope and deal with. 

Anyway, for what it’s worth that’s my thought process on it all. More or less. 🙂 

So what happened? Ugh. It’s a long story, but let me assure you (if you happen to care) it was just the way it goes sometimes. Life happened. I took the time I needed to confront it, and for the most part, resolve it. Cleared my head, tackled the challenges, hit it with everything I had. Now I am feeling stable and balanced. Happy and encouraged. Not without challenges, but not overwhelmed by any. Back to being me. If you’d still have me, I’d like to get back to being part of the amazing iOS music community. 

Thanks again for the great support. Sorry if it seemed like I just gave up or abandoned everything. I just had to sort things out.